| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Committee on the budget resolution and House GOP strategy to advance President Trump's legislative agenda. | |
| And economist and former White House Associate Budget Director Vance Ginn on the impact of President Trump's tariffs and how to address economic uncertainty. | ||
| That's followed by Washington Democratic Congresswoman Kim Schreier, a pediatrician and member of the Energy and Commerce Committee. | ||
| She'll talk about President Trump's tariffs and cuts to health care. | ||
| Also, Bipartisan Policy Center Senior Vice President Bill Hoagland discusses Republican efforts to pass a budget blueprint to advance the White House's legislative agenda. | ||
| Washington Journal is next. | ||
| The Chinese want to make a deal. | ||
| They just don't know how to do it. | ||
| But the president will be implementing these 104 percent tariffs on China tonight. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Wednesday, April 9th. | ||
| You just heard White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt yesterday announcing 104% tariffs on China going into effect at midnight, just a few hours ago. | ||
| Late last week, China had responded to President Trump's tariffs with their own reciprocal tariff of 34%. | ||
| This first half hour will get your thoughts and reaction. | ||
| Are we in a full-blown trade war with China? | ||
| Do you support or oppose the president's actions? | ||
| What impact do you expect on the economy and your own personal finances? | ||
| Here's how to reach us. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can send a text to 202-748-8003. | ||
| Send us your first name in your city-state. | ||
| And you can post your comments on social media, facebook.com/slash c-span and x at c-spanwj. | ||
| Welcome to today's Washington Journal. | ||
| Glad you're with us. | ||
| We'll start with more from Caroline Levitt at yesterday's press conference addressing China's tariffs. | ||
| Here she is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You mentioned the 70 countries or so. | |
| I'm curious, though, under what conditions at this point would President Trump talk to President Xi about tariffs? | ||
| Look, I just spoke to the president about this, and he believes that China wants to make a deal with the United States. | ||
| He believes China has to make a deal with the United States. | ||
| It was a mistake for China to retaliate. | ||
| The president, when America is punched, he punches back harder. | ||
| That's why there will be 104% tariffs going into effect on China tonight at midnight. | ||
| But the president believes that Xi and China want to make a deal. | ||
| They just don't know how to get that started. | ||
| And the president also wanted me to tell all of you that if China reaches out to make a deal, he'll be incredibly gracious, but he's going to do what's best for the American people. | ||
| So China has to call first? | ||
| The Chinese want to make a deal, they just don't know how to do it. | ||
| But the president will be implementing these 104% tariffs on China tonight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Under what conditions might he consider lowering tariffs on China at this point? | |
| It would be imprudent of me to tell you those conditions here from the podium. | ||
| That was the press secretary yesterday, and we are taking your calls, getting a reaction on the 104% tariffs on Chinese imports. | ||
| Here's a reaction from the Chinese Commerce Ministry. | ||
| They put this out yesterday, reported by the AP. | ||
| It says this. | ||
| The countermeasures China has taken are aimed at safeguarding its sovereignty, security, and development interests and maintaining the normal international trade order. | ||
| They are completely legitimate. | ||
| The U.S. threat to escalate tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake and once again exposes the blackmailing nature of the U.S. of the U.S. China will never accept this. | ||
| If the U.S. insists on its own way, China will fight to the end. | ||
| Wonder what you think about that. | ||
| Here's the Washington Post this morning with the headline, China remains defiant as Trump's 104% tariffs take effect. | ||
| Stocks sink. | ||
| Markets in Asia slumped as tariffs on products from 86 countries kicked in. | ||
| China said it would protect its economy, but also that it was open to dialogue. | ||
| It says that today Beijing said that it called for dialogue with Washington, even as it vowed to take, quote, forceful measures to protect the Chinese economy from President Donald Trump's 104% minimum tariffs. | ||
| We'll go to the calls now to Karen in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Karen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I am 110% in support of these tariffs against China. | ||
| The reasons? | ||
| Fentanyl deaths. | ||
| How many of those? | ||
| How many children have died from that? | ||
| How about stealing our technology? | ||
| We put all of the money and all of the time and resources into our technology and into research, and they steal it and they undermine our businesses. | ||
| So our harm to our American businesses and our families. | ||
| COVID deaths. | ||
| Chinese cover-up of the COVID virus origin is a crime against humanity. | ||
| They need to be held accountable. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And here's CJ in Falls Church, Virginia, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Yeah, the tone of this president is so unbecoming of any adult that I've ever met, much less somebody who should have the chops to be an actual statesman on the world stage. | ||
| And so not only are his policies reckless, trade deals are done all the time. | ||
| You don't have to talk about them. | ||
| You don't have to trash people's cultures. | ||
| Whether you think we're getting ripped off or not, be careful what you wish for, America, because we created this global system. | ||
| We created a liberal, for the most part, world, liberal in the old school sense. | ||
| I don't mean like American conservative liberal. | ||
| But our values of being outgoing people, an outgoing society, are things that we used to be the proudest of. | ||
| And now we're so scared that somebody's going to take something from us. | ||
| Well, why can't we just be a little bit better? | ||
| I grew up in a total blue-collar, you know, both my parents were union workers. | ||
| You know, what would be considered a very poor situation by today's standards. | ||
| But there's a way to do these things. | ||
| So, CJ, why do you think the tariffs would be bad for the United States? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, first of all, the promise that Trump is making on the back end is we're going to make so much money, then we're going to be able to give some more tax breaks back. | |
| Well, why don't we use any money that we get to pay down the debt? | ||
| Because the debt is the single biggest economic crusher. | ||
| And the old adage of like, you know, since 1980 with Ronald Reagan coming on the scene saying, you know, government's not the answer. | ||
| Government is the problem. | ||
| Well, how come it's only our government that's the problem? | ||
| How can a Chinese communist country beat us consistently for the last 25 years since they sort of like started opening up their society? | ||
| All right, TJ. | ||
| We're going to talk to Ryan now in New Orleans, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Ryan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, how you doing? | |
| I think the tariffs are awful. | ||
| I think that, but you have to blame the American people from voting this dude in the office. | ||
| You cannot live without the rest of the world. | ||
| And what this dude is doing, this president is, man, he's awful, man. | ||
| This is ridiculous for these days and times. | ||
| For this man to come up in here and do what he's doing, he's infired people in altered people's lives. | ||
| And the American people are just sitting around like nothing ain't going on, man. | ||
| This president didn't fired people. | ||
| So why do you not like the tariffs, though? | ||
| Getting back to that on Chinese imports. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't like the tariffs because you have to live with the rest of the world. | |
| Catch up. | ||
| You can't just impose things because you want to do it. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| You can't trust this president. | ||
| That's what he's saying. | ||
| I don't see nothing wrong with, I don't see nothing wrong with China. | ||
| They're the ones making the little bitty things that we need. | ||
| And if get some millionaires and billionaires in the United States to make some of the things they make and put it at a cheaper price, and we can live. | ||
| That's all I got. | ||
| Lovely. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And President Trump spoke at a fundraiser for the National Republican Congressional Committee last night, and he mentioned China. | ||
| Here he is. | ||
| What other presidents allow China to get away with is absolutely criminal, but I'm not like the other presidents, and it's not going to happen under President Trump. | ||
| It's just not going to happen. | ||
| After all of the abuses they've perpetrated, China's attempting to impose additional unjustified tariffs. | ||
| Just so you understand, they all got rich because of tariffs. | ||
| Now when we do it, oh, it's so terrible. | ||
| What Trump is doing is so terrible. | ||
| They got rich. | ||
| And not only China, many countries. | ||
| I mean, you look at Vietnam, you look at so many. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I could name 50 right now. | |
| Biden couldn't do that. | ||
| He couldn't name any. | ||
| Name one country. | ||
| Name any country. | ||
| What's the name of our country? | ||
| He doesn't know. | ||
| That's why additional tariffs on Chinese goods are in place effective midnight tonight at 104%. | ||
| Until they make a deal with us, that's what it's going to be. | ||
| I think they'll make a deal at some point. | ||
| China will, they want to make a deal. | ||
| They really do. | ||
| They want to make a deal. | ||
| They just don't know how to get it started because they're proud people. | ||
| And back to the phones now to Timothy in Idaho, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Well, right now, the temporary effect of the 104% is, of course, in the stock market. | ||
| But I would like to inform the United States that if the president could control the stock market, it would have went to infinity on 5 July 1776. | ||
| That's number three. | ||
| Number two, in a trade differential, there's always a kickback. | ||
| And Trump has been polite to not mention or hammer on the kickbacks and all these other funding channels that happened with administrations and with, for example, Hunter Biden shell corporations that hold Ukraine financing. | ||
| Okay, but number one, better the pain now than the pain later. | ||
| I work in technology, and it's better to solve this problem now. | ||
| And I think that's a good question. | ||
| So, in your work, Timothy, what kind of products, what's coming from overseas that would be affected by tariffs? | ||
|
unidentified
|
specifically what's what's coming from china anything from your oh my god During the collapse of the Reagan aerospace days, the Department of Defense capitulated and went to commercial off-the-shelf Chinese products. | |
| Used to be before that aerospace collapse at the end of the Reagan years that everything had to be made in the United States. | ||
| And then the Defense Department had a struggle with axioms to meet its defense requirements or to comply with the Made in America only, the supply line problem. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So it happened back then with a capitulation of the conflict of axioms. | ||
| So all these chips and everything are made in China. | ||
| Actually, even the Cadillac dealer I went to in Akron, Ohio, they had three on the lot because of the chip shortage back during the COVID. | ||
| So yep, got it. | ||
| Let's talk to Jack in Philadelphia, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My biggest concern is that China imports 13.4. | ||
| That's the percentage of U.S. goods that we import from China. | ||
| And 104% as a tariff is not going to change anything and bring back in manufacturing when we've already tried 34% tariffs, when we've already tried to go to 50%, 84%. | ||
| And so the biggest problem is this is a purely inflationary tax on the American people that we did not ask for. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And the biggest problem with the tariffs, with Trump's policy, even going back to Liberation Day, is that there's so many mixed messages. | ||
| You know, Eric Trump says that the tariffs start to, as a negotiating tactic, whereas Peter Navarro keeps saying that these tariffs are meant to raise revenue. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| When the United States was using tariffs, we were a manufacturing economy and definitely not the world's global power. | ||
| And the only thing that'll be great once, you know, these tariffs go effect that will be cheap are China's video imports. | ||
| Here's Alex in Brooklyn, New York. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I'm a garment manufacturer, so I have been making things in this country since my parents were making clothes. | ||
| And this is a disaster. | ||
| I really don't know what this president thinks. | ||
| If I just give you one example, thread. | ||
| Cotton thread went from $14 to $17 to $23, and that was yesterday. | ||
| If I check today, it's even going to be higher. | ||
| Wait, but where's the thread coming from? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The thread is coming from China. | |
| The thread is coming from China. | ||
| So can we not make thread here in the United States? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It would be extremely expensive. | |
| Why, Alex? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's too expensive. | |
| Because they don't have the infrastructure yet to make it. | ||
| And even the guys that have here, they tell me that there is such a backlog that it's going to even go through the roof. | ||
| So we are the ones that are paying for this. | ||
| And when people say that it's about fentanyl, well, the drug addicts are here. | ||
| If people didn't take fentanyl, there would be no problem. | ||
| same way that a gun doesn't kill somebody, but the person is the one that kills. | ||
| Well, the drug addicts are here. | ||
| You have to take care of your own people. | ||
| They're the ones that are. | ||
| Alex, when you say that we don't have the infrastructure to make the garments and the thread here, how long would it take, do you think, to get to the point where we could make it here and we could make it economically? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It takes years. | |
| I mean, you know, you have mills that make fabric here, and they don't have the capacity to make the fabric. | ||
| It takes such a long time to put this together. | ||
| And so if Trump were going to be smart about this, if these people are going to be smart, why are you even hurting the manufacturers here? | ||
| Why should fabric have a 104% tariff? | ||
| I have people that are telling me, I can guarantee you price today, but once the product is gone, once the fabric is gone, once the thread is gone, I can't guarantee you what that's going to be like in two weeks from now. | ||
| America, I ask you, how on earth is this policy going to help us, the manufacturers? | ||
| Because it's not. | ||
| I don't see it. | ||
| I brought in material before in December. | ||
| I brought in fabric. | ||
| I brought in paper because I do vaporized ink on fabric. | ||
| I look at the price today. | ||
| I brought in fabric at $1.29 a yard. | ||
| I'm looking at fabric now. | ||
| It's at $5.86. | ||
| And not only that, but when you bring this stuff in, when you have to pay for your stuff to come in in ships, the prices are even higher now because these companies are taking advantage of it. | ||
| So what are you going to do, Alex? | ||
| Are you going to pay the higher price? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I bought myself one year. | |
| I bought myself one year because I brought in material before this all happened. | ||
| I can tell you everybody. | ||
| And you did that because you knew that tariffs were coming. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Because I knew the uncertainty was coming. | ||
| And it's not even whether the tariffs are coming or not. | ||
| It's that our capitalist system allows people to exploit the situation. | ||
| So people knew that this was going to happen. | ||
| So people brought goods in. | ||
| And then what did the people do that bring the stuff in? | ||
| They raised the prices. | ||
| My broker told me, Alex, you have to pay extra just to get your stuff in before January kicks in, because if you don't, it's not going to get in. | ||
| We got to move on. | ||
| I want to show U.S. Trade Representative Jamison Greer. | ||
| He was testifying. | ||
| He or he is responding to a question about the administration's approach to tariffs on China. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's the status of discussions there? | |
| I don't see much progress. | ||
| What I see is it looks like it's going to escalate and escalate some more and hurt our consumers and our small businesses in our part of the world. | ||
| Well, Senator, unfortunately, China for many years seems to be choosing its own path on market access. | ||
| Again, they have agency in this. | ||
| They elected to announce retaliation. | ||
| Other countries did not. | ||
| Other countries signaled that they'd like to find a path forward on reciprocity. | ||
| China has not said that. | ||
| And we will see where that goes. | ||
| I think we need to work with our closest friends to make sure that we have trading arrangements that work. | ||
| And if the Chinese are open, you know, we'll see what, but they haven't signaled that at all. | ||
| So I don't think that's the, I don't think that's in the very near term with China. | ||
| I just am concerned that there's no strategy at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm committed. | |
| We understand in the Pacific Northwest what the stakes are. | ||
| To have a smart, tough strategy, I don't see any strategy at all. | ||
| And you really haven't said much about what the strategy is this morning. | ||
| Senator, I appreciate your concern. | ||
| I want to keep having a conversation with you about this. | ||
| But I see a distinct difference between those countries who have come to us and they said, we understand your issues. | ||
| We understand the deficit. | ||
| We understand your desire for reciprocity. | ||
| And we want to work with you on this. | ||
| And the Chinese approach, which has been we're going to retaliate, we're trying to remedy a situation. | ||
| We're trying to remedy a situation that's persisted for many years. | ||
| And it would be wonderful if the Chinese agreed with that and wanted to persist in, you know, work with us on that. | ||
| But that's not where they are. | ||
| And the president has recognized this, and he wants to focus on other partners. | ||
| We're talking about the 104% tariffs on Chinese imports and getting your reaction to that. | ||
| And we'll talk to Anita in Ypsilantee, Michigan, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| The reason why I'm independent and I'm calling is because I believe that we are in a real war with China, that it's only the economic part of it, not the physical part of it. | ||
| I feel the fact that, yes, that's a Democrat. | ||
| They do not understand the fact that China is going to be an enemy and they don't have a response. | ||
| The King Jeffries doesn't have a response. | ||
| Check Schumer doesn't have a response. | ||
| On the other side, you have the China hawks who aren't doing anything. | ||
| And the reason why I say that is I feel that Africa and all that untappability, all these untrapped resources is the key to everything. | ||
| She said that he found an untapped, a limitless supply of energy. | ||
| And I'm assuming that he believes that all the oil from Namibia and all the other places, but no one talks about that. | ||
| Everybody talks about terrorist in Europe. | ||
| Everybody talks about terrorists in Canada, but they never talk about in Asia. | ||
| They never talk about the tariffs that are in Africa, which I assume that China controls. | ||
| You have to stop China from controlling Africa. | ||
| Nobody wants to say that. | ||
| And how do you do that, Anita? | ||
| How do you stop Chinese influence in Africa? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's my biggest problem, my frustration, is that, again, very few people talk about it on C-SPAN. | |
| We had one woman who was from Senegal who talked about it, about the lack of American influence on China. | ||
| I've tried to talk to my, I guess, my senator. | ||
| Nothing happens. | ||
| Tried to send an email message. | ||
| Nothing happens. | ||
| No one seems to really care. | ||
| It's frustrating. | ||
| It's frustrating. | ||
| I mean, I would have wished that C-SPAN had more Africans on and say, hey, what can we do? | ||
| I think the Democrats need to put more pressure on Trump and say, hey, you have a problem with China. | ||
| Why aren't you going to Africa to sit around here and change these things? | ||
| I don't understand the Congressional Black Caucus. | ||
| They're not doing anything. | ||
| The Republican Party needs to go to tell Trump, hey, you're a China hawk. | ||
| You got to go to Africa. | ||
| You have to stop sitting around with Elon Musk, sit around there and respect South Africa and understand all the things that are going on. | ||
| The African Development Bank is going to have a, I guess they're going to have a vote in May about who's going to run that. | ||
| Trump has a leader that has his own candidate who's going to sit around running for the president. | ||
| I don't know what to do. | ||
| I'm just one person. | ||
| All right, Anita. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Other people care. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Here's Tim, Germantown, Maryland Democrat. | ||
| Hello, Tim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So at one point, I work in a retail environment and I work at Macy's. | ||
| Shirts, ties, and clothing were sold in those stores by our current President Trump. | ||
| So if somebody who used the system, use China, and all of these materials were not made in the U.S. | ||
| They were made in China. | ||
| And I remember during one interview, the interviewer was asking him, so what you have a nice tie. | ||
| And I see and say, oh, yeah, these are one of my ties. | ||
| Where did it meet? | ||
| Was made in China. | ||
| First point. | ||
| Second point: these tariffs, what's happening to our stock market is falling. | ||
| It's falling big time. | ||
| And who are those investing in stock market currently? | ||
| Who are those buying the stock which are becoming cheaper and cheaper? | ||
| Those people who can afford do not talk and his bodies. | ||
| Wake up America. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Here's Kevin in Los Angeles, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, this is Kevin. | |
| Am I the right? | ||
| Am I on? | ||
| Yes, you are. | ||
| Go ahead, Kevin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you today? | ||
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good. | |
| I'm in support of tariffs, and I am going to explain why. | ||
| Number one, and then I have a comment. | ||
| And I think I want to make the comment first before I explain why I'm for the tariffs. | ||
| The comment that I have for the gentleman who called that's a manufacturer of clothing, I think he's from New York. | ||
| My answer to him and all his problems is he should start manufacturing thread. | ||
| And his price of thread increasing is really a problem that, like I said, he ought to start manufacturing thread. | ||
| So, Kevin, I asked him about that, and he said there's no infrastructure here to do that. | ||
| And I said, How long would it take? | ||
| He said, Years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, you know what? | |
| There was no infrastructure here to start manufacturing steel when Andrew Carnegie started manufacturing steel. | ||
| And there was no infrastructure here to refine oil when Rockwell, you know, the Standard Oil, the Rockwell guy, started manufacturing oil and refining oil. | ||
| So it's just a lame excuse. | ||
| Now, I'll give you an example. | ||
| When I was 22 years old, it was in the early 1980s, interest rates 21% in the country, and I was manufacturing cabinets, and every day the price was up because inflation was 20%. | ||
| So it's just a lame excuse. | ||
| Now, that's not the real reason why I'm fortunate. | ||
| Here's the reason why I'm fortunate. | ||
| Number one, the problem with all this fear-mongering about its inflationary is really not the case. | ||
| The underlying reason for inflation is because of the money supply and everything that happened with the give-outs and the loans and money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, the reason why the tariffs are not going to be inflationary is everybody that's talking about it who is saying that with the fear-mongering inflation is because of this. | |
| The vast majority of consumers in this country of what they pay for every month that they have to pay out of their budget is rent or housing or food, which can be bought in the United States. | ||
| But the vast majority of the person's budget of the consumers are things that are currently manufactured here in the United States. | ||
| All right, Kevin. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| Let's take a look at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer criticizing President Trump over his approach to tariffs and the lack of Senate Republican support pushing back against him. | ||
| He made these comments yesterday. | ||
| President Trump introduced tariffs on so-called Liberation Day. | ||
| But the only thing so far that Americans have been liberated from is economic stability. | ||
| As everyone knows right now, the nation is in tariff chaos. | ||
| No one really knows what's going on, especially the president. | ||
| These tariffs are self-inflicted catastrophe on the United States. | ||
| The market continues to teeter. | ||
| Your retirement accounts are in a whiplash. | ||
| A report by J.P. Morgan, now they're normally a stayed banker, but you know what the title of their report was? | ||
| There will be blood. | ||
| And it warned that, quote, these policies, if sustained, would likely push the U.S. and possibly the global economy into a recession this year. | ||
| They continued with a warning, raising the risk of recession this year to 60%. | ||
| The stock market's all over the place. | ||
| But what really is bothering the American people is the potential rise, the dramatic rise in costs, what they pay for food, for medicine, for clothing, for housing, for cars, for gas. | ||
| The fact that in a recession it's harder to get a job, advance in your job, and it's harder to, and it's more likely you'll be laid off. | ||
| It's more likely you'll pay for more. | ||
| So the American people are focused on how it will affect them in their pocketbook, whether they own stocks or not. | ||
| The choice in front of Leader Thune and Speaker Johnson is simple. | ||
| Are they going to choose Donald Trump or are they going to choose American families? | ||
| Stand up to Donald Trump or watch him walk us directly into a recession. | ||
| And so far, they're not standing up. | ||
| That was Senator Schumer yesterday, and we're going to hit pause on our calls. | ||
| We will come back to our calls. | ||
| But first, we're going to speak to Representative Ralph Norman. | ||
| He's a Republican of South Carolina. | ||
| He's on the Budget and Financial Services Committees. | ||
| And Representative Norman, welcome to the program. | ||
| Glad to be with you, Mamie. | ||
| So I do want to ask you about what's happening with the budget, but since we've been talking about tariffs, wanted to get your reaction to the 104% tariffs that went into effect at midnight on Chinese imports. | ||
| Well, first of all, the tariffs are a good thing for the country. | ||
| I think most Americans realize that one-way trade does not benefit America. | ||
| President Trump is putting America first with this. | ||
| Now, is it going to be some pain? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But the President knows when to pull back and he knows when to exercise the power of the tariff. | ||
| China particularly. | ||
| China is not our friend. | ||
| We've seen that with the border crossings, the fentanyl that's killed so many young Americans that were made in China for the most part. | ||
| So it's the right thing to do and it's going to be painful for a while. | ||
| How long do you think it'll be painful, Congressman? | ||
| Well, I don't really know other than the fact that what he's done right is on those products that could not be made here in the country, he's put exemptions in place. | ||
| I know some cars, some manufacturers he's exempted. | ||
| And so it'll be industry by industry. | ||
| I know with the textile industry, which has got a lot riding on this. | ||
| They've had fixed contracts, and there's no way they could add the cost of the tariffs to the final product. | ||
| But he's put exemptions in place, which have helped a number of them in my state of South Carolina. | ||
| Well, let's go to the budget now. | ||
| You are on the budget committee, and you're a member of the Freedom Caucus. | ||
| Can you tell us what's the latest on House action on that Senate-approved budget framework? | ||
| Well, first of all, Mimi, no one has explained to us who are doubtful that the Senate will deliver anything above the $4 billion cuts. | ||
| The cancer in America is spending. | ||
| It's not income. | ||
| And no one has signaled to us the urgency to do this. | ||
| We can go ahead and work on our approach bills and continue on in getting our numbers of reconciliation. | ||
| And if you look at it, the base that we want to see cut is 1.5 with an aspiration of $2 trillion. | ||
| They've offered $4 billion. | ||
| That's 0.2% of what we signal and what we, Mike Johnson did a good job of shepherding the 218 votes. | ||
| We're a long way off. | ||
| So at the end of the day, I think I'm on the rules committee and I think it will come out of, we're going to vote to send it out of rules, put it on the floor, but I think it will fail because I don't think there's been enough reasoning to us who are budget conscious, who are deficit conscious, to satisfy that the Senate would do the right thing. | ||
| So does that mean you would vote against it? | ||
| I am going to vote against it. | ||
| And that vote is happening today? | ||
| Probably happen tomorrow. | ||
| So what's the path forward then? | ||
| Well, I think, you know, we could, this is not that difficult, Mimi. | ||
| All we have, we could send over a resolution. | ||
| We could go to conference, but send a resolution over that signals what our intentions are. | ||
| And the $2 trillion in cuts are what we voted on and got the 218 votes. | ||
| The Senate needs to come back and get serious about any type proposal. | ||
| If it's not good enough just to tell us they want to just trust us, we will, at the end of the day, make the proper cuts. | ||
| That's not going to satisfy the majority of those of us who are going to vote against it. | ||
| And if you're serious, put it in writing. | ||
| We've got an arithmetic problem that we've got to solve. | ||
| And Congressman, what are the proper cuts in your perspective? | ||
| What do you want to see cut that would make a substantial impact on the national debt? | ||
| Well, $2 trillion is a start. | ||
| Now, is it the end-all to solve the deficit crisis? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, but when you have the interest that's exceeding getting close to a trillion dollars, which is our military budget, the interest alone on our debt cannot keep going. | ||
| And so the $2 trillion is a start. | ||
| I think with Doge and everything else the President is doing, we could codify the cuts that Doge is finding. | ||
| It's not suitable to have, as Doge has found out, Elon Musk and his team, 7 million people who are 120 years old and older getting a paycheck. | ||
| That's not suitable. | ||
| And I think the cuts, the agencies that have been cut already or are going to be cut, I think will go a long way to getting our debt if we can put the money where it matters, which is cut spending. | ||
| And each agency is going to have to do that. | ||
| We've got 12 appropriate bills, and every one of them are going to have to find some way to come up with, to begin with, the $2 trillion. | ||
| So that $2 trillion, do you see any cuts to Social Security, to Medicare, to Medicaid? | ||
| No. | ||
| At all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We can't do that. | |
| You feel like you can get to $2 trillion cuts without touching those? | ||
| Well, with Social Security, we can't cut reconciliation anyway. | ||
| Now, the fraud and abuse we can deal with. | ||
| I think most Americans understand that having that many people that are dead getting checks is not right. | ||
| With Medicaid, we can't deal with any cuts in that. | ||
| What we can deal with, though, is able-bodied workers who can go to work need to be off the rolls. | ||
| Now, we can deal with that, but you will see no cuts in Social Security payments. | ||
| You will see no cuts in Medicaid payments. | ||
| You will see, hopefully, some alterations made where they need to be made and have needed to be faced for a long time, meaning able-bodied workers, in particular Medicaid. | ||
| President Trump met with the GOP caucus yesterday. | ||
| Can you tell us what happened and if he changed any minds there? | ||
| I was not invited to come. | ||
| In talking with those briefly after the meeting yesterday, and we all went to hear the president talk last night, or the majority of us did. | ||
| You know, he explained that he thought the cuts would come from what, and he may have switched some people, but it's still not enough to pass the bill. | ||
| There's got to be a lot more work done. | ||
| And we want to see the Trump agenda, the tax cuts. | ||
| We want to see that happen. | ||
| We're not going to let that lapse. | ||
| But along with it, we've got to handle the cancer in the country, which is overspending. | ||
| And now, if we don't do it now with reconciliation, we will never do it. | ||
| So we just have to go back to work and urge the Senate to do their job. | ||
| And is there a plan B, Congressman, if the House and Senate can't agree? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| We'll go to conference. | ||
| I think Speaker Johnson, and this may pass. | ||
| I mean, I may be, you know, stranger things have happened when people say they're going to vote one way and then change. | ||
| But I anticipate it failing on the floor tomorrow. | ||
| And I anticipate plan B, which would be to send a resolution over having our intent. | ||
| And the intent is to start cutting the deficit at the $2 trillion level. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Representative Ralph Norman, Republican of South Carolina on the Budget and Financial Services Committees and a member of the Freedom Caucus. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us this morning. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And we will come back to your calls. | ||
| We're talking about the 104% tariffs on Chinese imports. | ||
| If you'd like to talk about other tariffs as well, you can do so for the next 25 minutes or so. | ||
| Here is Anthony, Heightsville, Maryland, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Anthony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, the tariffs, as you can see, we are at 2.0 with the gang who can't shoot straight. | ||
| Most of the people who called in, as you can remember, y'all gave him the popular vote. | ||
| That means most of you who complained didn't want that 10% raise that Biden was wanting to put 10% to the rich to cover everything. | ||
| And I guarantee you they lost a lot more than 10%. | ||
| That Joe Biden, he's looking pretty good right now. | ||
| I'm saying, these cuts, people just don't realize that most of our product does come from overseas. | ||
| It's China. | ||
| You know, we're not producing anything here in this United States anymore. | ||
| And it will take years, like the guy said, before you can even ramp up to get production here to do anything, to make our own drugs, to make our own, because most of our drugs are made overseas. | ||
| Most of your, you know, even if it's coming from Europe or something like Wagovi and all those drugs, those things are made in Europe, not Asia. | ||
| So we're dependent on a lot of different people. | ||
| And Trump came in saying he wanted to be a dictator. | ||
| And as you can see, he's dictating and destroying our economy, the world economy. | ||
| So I don't know where we're going to go from here. | ||
| But like the guy said, it's going to take years before we can ramp up. | ||
| Anthony, I do want to show, since you mentioned pharmaceuticals, this is Reuters with the headline. | ||
| Trump says U.S. will soon announce tariffs on pharmaceutical imports. | ||
| And he did mention it at that event last night at the fundraiser. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so even if they don't cut Social Security and Medicaid, seniors are going to be paying a lot more. | |
| And just like we're paying a lot more for eggs now, we're paying a lot more for gas. | ||
| And after everybody was complaining about Joe Biden, oh, look at the price of gas, look at the price of eggs. | ||
| Well, look at the price of eggs under Trump. | ||
| All right, Anthony. | ||
| Well, let's hear from President Trump from last night's event. | ||
| But we're going to do something that we have to do. | ||
| We're going to tariff our pharmaceuticals. | ||
| And once we do that, they're going to come rushing back into our country because we're the big market. | ||
| The advantage we have over everybody is that we're the big market. | ||
| So we're going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals. | ||
| And when you and when they hear that, they will leave China. | ||
| They will leave other places because they have to sell most of their product is sold here. | ||
| And they're going to be opening up their plants all over the place in our country. | ||
| We're going to be announcing that. | ||
| So that's breaking news. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, we have breaking news. | ||
| And here is Mark, San Pedro, California, Independent Line. | ||
| Hello, Mark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, I called on the Independent Line because the state of California withdrew my recognition as a member of the Socialist Workers Party. | ||
| So they just put me as a nonpartisan. | ||
| I heard the woman from Ypsilanti, she was calling from Michigan. | ||
| My grandmother was from Michigan in the UP. | ||
| And I remember all the copper mining that happened in Michigan. | ||
| And I grew up in Wisconsin, Illinois. | ||
| You know, I first registered to vote in the state of Minnesota as a member of the Socialist Workers. | ||
| So, Mark, going back to the tariffs, what are your thoughts on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, tariffs are one thing, but the state of the country, a congressman who said that there are people 127 years old receiving Social Security checks is ridiculous. | |
| I don't understand how that man is a congressman. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And here's Katie, Mansfield, Ohio, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning, Katie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Mimi, one of the things, when President Trump says we're bringing in trillions and trillions of dollars, isn't what he really means is we're bringing in trillions and trillions of stuff made in China, made in Vietnam, and then we're going to pay the taxes on those trillions and trillions of dollars of stuff coming in. | ||
| And so what are your thoughts, Katie, given that you're a Republican? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm not a Trump supporter. | |
| Did you vote for him last time? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've never voted for him. | |
| Yet you still call yourself a Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Growing up, I kind of viewed Trump as an eccentric, spoiled trust fund baby, you know, who just hung out at Studio 54. | ||
| You know, I'm like, kind of a joke. | ||
| So I never understood his run for presidency anyway. | ||
| But you still support Republican members of Congress, the Senate, that kind of thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| And you're against these tariffs. | ||
| You think they're a bad idea? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're absolutely the worst idea ever. | |
| What impact do you think you'll see on your own personal finances? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, what I did was I used chat GPT after he won, and I had it. | |
| I just asked it what was everything made, what's everything made in China. | ||
| And then I proceeded to buy my imports from there, you know, from the list. | ||
| And Vietnam, I think, makes like 95% of our clothes. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Here's Roger Abilene, Kansas, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Roger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I am a Democrat who voted for Donald Trump for one reason. | ||
| And I was over the last Biden years, I would say every time I would call in, I'd mention that we needed to close that border. | ||
| And I voted for Donald Trump just for that one reason, that he closed the border. | ||
| He said he would close it, and he proved he could do it. | ||
| Now, as far as tariffs, I'm in agriculture. | ||
| I farm. | ||
| When Biden came in, I watched nitrogen that we have to buy for our crops go from 35 cents a unit to 105 cents a unit. | ||
| I watched fuel go from diesel fuel go from $1.90 to $5. | ||
| I have a semi that every time I would fill it up, it was $800. | ||
| Now, you try to figure out how to make that work two days a week or something like anytime you need it. | ||
| These tariffs, I've always felt like tariffs were our best thing we have because China doesn't buy from us because they're our best friend. | ||
| They buy from us because they have to, and they also buy from us because we're the big, the fat daddy that has the big checkbook that can write the check and not renege on it. | ||
| So I think these are a good situation for us. | ||
| And the other thing, when they speak about we're trading, you know, we sell China our commodities. | ||
| We sell them food. | ||
| We sell them corn. | ||
| We sell them soybeans. | ||
| They're buying their beans. | ||
| They don't buy their beans from us because they like America. | ||
| They buy their beans when South America runs out of beans, when South America gets to the point they can't deliver anymore. | ||
| That's mainly when they come to us, and they do buy quite a bit. | ||
| Well, and I've been on the farm all my life. | ||
| And one thing I remember my dad taught me: we had a small cow herd of about 80 cows. | ||
| And when the neighbors would get their horses out and go chase the cattle and try to run it, round them up, my dad said, well, here's one thing you do. | ||
| He said, a cow is a victim of habit. | ||
| He will come and eat every morning. | ||
| So we start feeding them hay every morning at the same time. | ||
| And then we would move them closer to the catch pen. | ||
| And the last day we would feed them inside the catch pen. | ||
| The cattle walked in. | ||
| We shut a gate and we had them caught. | ||
| People are the same way. | ||
| All right, Roger. | ||
| And Xiannon is reporting that with this, China hits back with 84% tariffs on U.S. goods as markets fall. | ||
| Here is Anwar, Washington, D.C., Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| As far as the trade, I do not necessarily believe it is a good thing, nor is it a bad thing. | ||
| I think this is a product of as far back as Ronald Reagan when they decided to send everything overseas and basically destroy the labor market in this country. | ||
| No one is going to, no CEO of any of these corporations will bring back their companies based on this because they do not want to pay American workers a living salary. | ||
| So they don't have a problem paying two, five, or $15 a month over there rather than pay an American worker a living wage. | ||
| We know that because they won't even raise minimum wage in this country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So they don't want to pay pensions anymore. | |
| I guess you're probably too young to even remember when companies used to have out a retirement pan and a pension until Ronald Reagan came in. | ||
| Then we had to go to the stock market with 401ks. | ||
| So this idea that he's going to bring jobs back is absolutely wrong. | ||
| And if people think that they really, you know, I've got some waterfront property in Arizona. | ||
| It's just not going to happen. | ||
| All right, Anwar. | ||
| And this is the New York Times front page. | ||
| Brushing off concerns, Trump pushes forward with his steep tariffs. | ||
| It says closings and layoffs at auto factories. | ||
| President Trump's 25% tariffs on imported vehicles, which went into effect last week, are already sending tremors through the auto industry, prompting companies to stop shipping cars to the United States, shut down factories in Canada and Mexico, and lay off workers in Michigan and other states. | ||
| It says Jaguar Land Rover, based in Britain, said it would temporarily stop exporting its luxury cars to the U.S. Stellantis idled factories in Canada and Mexico that make Chrysler and Jeep vehicles and laid off 900 U.S. workers who supplied those factories with engines and other parts. | ||
| Rich, Republican, Marion Ohio, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, great conversations. | |
| Some of this stuff could be solved in five minutes. | ||
| We know fraud that people are stealing from our Social Security, too old or whatever. | ||
| We know who they are. | ||
| Why does anyone object to that? | ||
| And not only that, but the problem we have is unfair trade things. | ||
| Who's against, who wants us to have unfair trade? | ||
| We're for fair trade, and we got to deal with that. | ||
| We let China into the World Trade Organization. | ||
| They had some rules. | ||
| They broke every damn rule over there. | ||
| And they're taking advantage plus stealing our intellectual property. | ||
| You have to say, okay, who's for this? | ||
| And who would yell fire in the theater if it's not going their way? | ||
| A drug addict would say, hey, I'm not going to go along with you, mom and dad. | ||
| I'm going to burn down your damn house. | ||
| And that's what they're saying. | ||
| Who is saying, burn down our house right now? | ||
| China, CNN. | ||
| So, Rich, I've got a question for you. | ||
| You mentioned theft of intellectual property. | ||
| How do you stop China from stealing that intellectual property, given that we're a very open society? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know how you do that because sometimes in software, some countries buy two copies, one to copy and one to have a backup copy. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| It's really a tricky problem. | ||
| But this is a five-minute job. | ||
| We're all suffering through this. | ||
| It's a five-minute job. | ||
| This is unfair. | ||
| But people are going to back up China and say, this is their talking points. | ||
| U.S. is bad. | ||
| U.S. is unfair. | ||
| But we aren't. | ||
| And they're going to have a gasoline truck through their internet and pour it into our country, and we're going to eat it all up and burn down our own house. | ||
| This is a five-minute thing. | ||
| If there's fraud, stop it. | ||
| If there's unfair practices, just stop it. | ||
| We shouldn't be having to raise our problems up. | ||
| This is a five-minute job. | ||
| Got it, Rich. | ||
| Here's Jeff on the line for Democrats from Kent, Ohio. | ||
| Hi, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| You know, I come from the Mawn Valley, the Rust Belt. | ||
| Towns like Charlotte, Pennsylvania, Manessen, Pennsylvania, Braddock, PA, where Senator Fetterman's from. | ||
| These towns are devastated. | ||
| There's nothing left. | ||
| The towns, the vibrant cities, and the towns and the stores that I grew up with are all gone. | ||
| They are absolutely shadows of what they once were. | ||
| And right now, the president's saying, look, these people have suffered enough. | ||
| We've got to start to get some of these basic industries back into the country. | ||
| It's the national security issue, if nothing else. | ||
| Now, one of your previous callers was very, was correct. | ||
| Our wages, there may be some things that have to be done in regards to our wages, but nonetheless, nonetheless, they want us to pay for schools. | ||
| They want us to pay for the roads. | ||
| They want us to pay all these taxes and to support this infrastructure that we have, but they don't want to pay anyone an appropriate wage to do so. | ||
| So there is, you know, we're between a rock and a hard place. | ||
| And I given this guy can be a bull in a China shop. | ||
| But if you look at the Mond Valley, these people have suffered enough. | ||
| These towns are destroyed. | ||
| I stand with the president in regards to these tariffs. | ||
| I don't know how it's going to work out, but I know one thing: be brave. | ||
| Put some backbone, get some backbone and be brave, America. | ||
| Let's find out if we can fix some of these issues that have taken 50 years to bring upon us. | ||
| And that's all I have today, Mimi. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, Jeff. | ||
| Here's Brian, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I'd like to remind all the Democrats that the seeds for this current Trumpian nightmare were all sown by Bill Clinton and the New Way Democrats who gave China WTO and signed all those silly trade agreements that put us in this position. | ||
| This was all predicted. | ||
| I remember discussing this. | ||
| I'm lucky. | ||
| I was in a labor union, so I have a tension. | ||
| I remember discussing this around our lunch table about how NAFTA, China agreements were all going to affect the American working class. | ||
| And the smart old timers knew that this was going to destroy the American worker, and it has. | ||
| So, Democrats, take a look in the mirror and think about Bill Clinton and all the other manure that was sold to you. | ||
| And then I'd also like to talk about Donald Trump a bit. | ||
| I have no idea how this myth of Trump, the great businessman, got started. | ||
| He's terrible. | ||
| He's bankrupted five businesses. | ||
| Does anybody remember the USFL, the New Jersey Generals, which Donald Trump was the owner of? | ||
| And that's how he got to know Virtual Walker, who he thought should be senator from Georgia. | ||
| Well, one of the main reasons that league went bankrupt was because of Donald Trump, because he violated all the ownership agreements. | ||
| And so nobody could make any money because of Donald Trump, and the league went kaput. | ||
| Donald Trump is terrible. | ||
| And here's Shai, Plainview, New York, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in favor of the tariffs if it achieves the end result of bringing business back to the United States. | |
| If you go shopping, let's say in the supermarket, you cannot find any goods that are made here, very few. | ||
| Almost everything is made in China, including other stores such as Macy's, TJ Maxx. | ||
| We started this. | ||
| We made China rich thinking that they would be our friend. | ||
| They are not. | ||
| Xi is an enemy to the world. | ||
| He employs slave labor. | ||
| He has concentration camps for the Uyghurs. | ||
| He claims all of the South China Sea. | ||
| They're interested in hegemony. | ||
| This is going on without any penalty. | ||
| Trump sees the tariffs as a penalty so that if we make China goods more expensive, we're less likely to import them. | ||
| We have to disconnect from China, especially pharmaceuticals. | ||
| Also, we allow them to purchase land in the United States. | ||
| Where's the reciprocity? | ||
| Can we purchase land in China? | ||
| I think we should expropriate the land. | ||
| All right, Charlie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Anyway, that's my take on it. | |
| All right. | ||
| And here is Treasury Secretary Scott Besant. | ||
| He was interviewed by CNBC about the strength that the U.S. has with trading partners. | ||
| Over the weekend, President Trump has maximum negotiating leverage right here, right now. | ||
| And I think it would be a mistake for anyone to think otherwise. | ||
| And many of, as I said, many of our trading partners have queued up and they have kept their cool. | ||
| They have not escalated. | ||
| And they will get priority in the queue. | ||
| I think it was a big mistake, this Chinese escalation, because they're playing with a pair of twos. | ||
| Traditionally, if you look at the history of the trade negotiations, we are the deficit country. | ||
| So what do we lose by the Chinese raising tariffs on us? | ||
| We export one-fifth to them of what they export to us. | ||
| So that is a losing hand for them. | ||
| And let's talk to Kerry, Austin, Texas, Independent Line. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I am a left-leaning independent. | ||
| I haven't voted Republican in, gosh, since Bush, the first one, I don't think. | ||
| The Republicans have lost their mind. | ||
| This tariff madness is just a tax on us. | ||
| Who can afford to pay twice as much for your drugs in America because of the tariffs? | ||
| 104%. | ||
| That means the price doubles. | ||
| We're the ones paying those tariffs. | ||
| We can't afford it. | ||
| Trump has lost all of our allies that you'd buy by treating that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's separated us from the rest of the world, and that makes me really angry. | |
| I think he needs to think about us. | ||
| He promised to lower our prices and has not done so. | ||
| He's doubled them, and we need to get to Congress off their boats and voting and taking the books back and thinking for themselves. | ||
| Thank you for my first chance to talk. | ||
| All right, Kerry. | ||
| And that's it for this segment. | ||
| But we will continue our conversation about President Trump's tariffs and how to address economic uncertainty with former Trump administration economist and White House Associate Budget Director Vance Ginn. | ||
| Then later in the program, Washington State Democrat Kim Schreier of Washington, who was a physician, discusses healthcare policy in the Trump administration. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Richard Overy is a British historian who has spent most of his professional life writing books about war, primarily World War II. | ||
| Professor Overy's current work is called Reign of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan. | ||
| Liner notes on the cover of the book say, quote, With the development of the B-29 Super Fortress in the summer of 1944, strategic bombing, a central component of the Allied war effort against Germany, arrived in the Pacific Theater. | ||
| 1945, Japan experienced the three most deadly bombing attacks of the war. | ||
| Professor Richard Overy is 77 and lives in Great Britain and Italy. | ||
| He has written close to 30 books. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Richard Overy with his book, Reign of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan on this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | |
| Book Notes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| This Saturday, watch the final segment in our 10-part American History TV series, First 100 Days. | ||
| We've been exploring the early months of presidential administrations with historians and authors and through the C-SPAN archives. | ||
| And we've learned about accomplishments and setbacks and how events impacted presidential terms and the nation up to present day. | ||
| This Saturday, the first 100 days of Donald Trump's first term. | ||
| As a businessman, he won elective office for the first time in 2016 by defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton. | ||
| President Trump pushed for construction of a wall at the southern border, a travel ban against people from certain countries, repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and a tax cut plan. | ||
| He also nominated Neil Gorsuch for Supreme Court, the first of three justices confirmed to the high court during his presidency. | ||
| Watch the final program in our American History TV series, First 100 Days, Saturday at 7 p.m. Eastern on American History TV on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| By Vance Ginn. | ||
| He's a former chief economist for the Office of Management and Budget under the first Trump administration, also founder and president of Ginn Economic Consulting and host of the podcast called Let People Prosper. | ||
| Vance, welcome to the program. | ||
| Hey, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a pleasure to be with you today. | |
| So if you could just first start with talking about your background in economic policy and the role that you played in the first Trump administration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| My position there was chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House from June 2019 to May of 2020. | ||
| It was an extraordinary time. | ||
| I helped write the president's last budget. | ||
| I also was there during COVID and being in a situation room having these discussions about what's going to come next with shutdowns or the virus, COVID-19 and everything else. | ||
| And I was there for quite a while through all that. | ||
| It was an extraordinary experience. | ||
| Before that, I had worked at a place called the Texas Public Policy Foundation on a lot of policies in Texas, where I live, near Austin, Texas, and across the country. | ||
| And I have a PhD in economics from Texas Tech University. | ||
| I'm from Houston, and I've been around here and first-generation college student who went on to the White House. | ||
| And so it's an extraordinary opportunity, and I'm glad to be here with you this morning to discuss these trying times in the economy. | ||
| Well, you call them trying times. | ||
| What was your reaction to President Trump's tariff announcement on what he was calling Liberation Day? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, look, I want to start off by saying, you know, tariffs are taxes. | |
| They're taxes on Americans. | ||
| And I think we should all understand that. | ||
| But oftentimes it gets kind of thrown around as what are tariffs and everything. | ||
| And that's really what they are. | ||
| They're tariffs on anything that you, they're taxes on anything that you import from another country. | ||
| And so the things that we import from China, from Mexico, from Australia, from England, these are all things that will be taxed as you bring them in. | ||
| And so this idea of a Liberation Day from raising taxes on Americans, you know, to be quite honest, didn't make much sense to me. | ||
| In fact, I think it puts Americans last whenever you're thinking about raising taxes on them to get a certain way out there. | ||
| And I think there's also some issues I'd like to discuss today about the assumptions that go into making these decisions about talking about the hollowing out of the rust belt, you know, the manufacturing jobs that have left and things of that nature. | ||
| I hope we get into that today. | ||
| But my initial reaction was that this is going to hurt. | ||
| And even President Trump has mentioned that. | ||
| He said, look, we're going to have some short-term cost, what he hopes is long-term gains. | ||
| I'm hopeful that that's the case, but I'll admit that I'm cautiously optimistic, if not even less than optimistic about this situation, because ordinarily when you raise taxes on Americans, that's not when you get more economic growth. | ||
| You get less economic opportunity. | ||
| And that's at least in this situation. | ||
| And I think there are better ways to go after China, to go after some of these other situations that will allow for more prosperity in America. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, so we'll get into all that, but first remind us how tariffs actually work. | ||
| So when a good comes into the United States, who pays that tariff? | ||
| Where does that money go? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So like I said, tariffs are taxes on Americans. | ||
| And so what happens is just like when you go and buy, let's say you buy something with a sales tax, you pay for the item, the business collects that tax, and then they remit it to the state or the local government across the United States. | ||
| Think about it that way. | ||
| Well, a tariff is on something whenever you import something from another country. | ||
| And then you say, okay, well, that business will then collect those taxes here in America and then make that payment to the federal government. | ||
| But what will they then do? | ||
| They pass that higher cost, that tax, on in the form of higher prices, lower wages, and fewer jobs. | ||
| So it's not the business that pays the taxes. | ||
| The people pay the taxes. | ||
| We pay the taxes for those items. | ||
| And so this is really where you see the issue with tariffs is it's costing us more to import the items and trade makes up about 15% of our overall economy. | ||
| So this isn't like it's just a small amount. | ||
| And then that trickles down through all of us through higher prices, especially for those who can't afford it the most, the lower income folks. | ||
| That's who it typically hits the hardest. | ||
| And you also see this is less economic activity. | ||
| If you're raising the price on something arbitrarily through forced taxes, forced higher tariffs, then you have less economic growth. | ||
| A recent report by the Tax Foundation showed that there would be about a 0.7 percentage point decline in economic activity over time and a loss of jobs over time as well. | ||
| And that's because of this higher cost, higher tax that's being fed through the economy from raising tariffs on Americans. | ||
| So Vance, I guess the concept then would be, or at least the reason you would put tariffs, is to get people to say, you know what, I don't want to buy this stuff from overseas. | ||
| I'll buy something that doesn't have that tax, as you call it, here in the United States, thereby spurring more manufacturing and production here in the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, theoretically, you can make the argument of that. | |
| And that's what the Trump administration or some of the Trump administration are saying. | ||
| I heard that a lot when I was in the Trump administration the first time around. | ||
| And I had a lot of debates about this while I was there. | ||
| And I should mention, you know, during the first Trump administration, there was a lot of differing opinions, which was great. | ||
| We had a lot of good discussions. | ||
| This time around, I don't see that as much. | ||
| It seems like most of them are right on board with tariffs and other things. | ||
| You don't have Larry Kudlow in there, for example, saying, hey, look, maybe we should go in a different direction, more of a free trade pro-growth route. | ||
| It doesn't seem like there's as many people doing that now within the Trump administration. | ||
| But back to your point, theoretically, that is what they would like to see happen. | ||
| Raise the cost on things that we're importing. | ||
| And so that way we will just shift and substitute those goods away to something that's being produced in America. | ||
| And then hopefully that will increase manufacturing here in the United States, have more economic growth, and everything will be great. | ||
| The problem is, is that, well, there's a lot of problems with this, but one is that there's not a quick substitution. | ||
| There's not like we could just turn on the manufacturing here in the United States. | ||
| A lot of that has went to other places across the globe, including China, including Mexico, including a lot of other of our allies across the globe. | ||
| And this sort of trade amongst many people really helps us to improve our economic output, improve our economy overall. | ||
| You know, Mildred Friedman, my favorite economist, he would talk about the pencil, which Leonard Reed wrote this book called iPencil, which basically says if you look at a simple pencil, no one in the whole world knows how to make that pencil from the graphite that goes in there, the wood, all the things that go into the wood and creating that and everything else. | ||
| We don't know how to make one pencil. | ||
| How are we going to make a computer? | ||
| How are we going to make a television and things of that nature? | ||
| This is much more complex than just saying, okay, we're going to turn off trade with one country and then we're going to produce it here in America. | ||
| Well, where are we going to find those people? | ||
| Where are going to be the workers? | ||
| And so there are many other issues by just saying that you're going to do that. | ||
| And also the situation here, too, it's done by brute force. | ||
| It's not saying through market activity, through prices and profitability, where those products will be produced. | ||
| It's saying, look, we're going to raise taxes on Americans to do this. | ||
| And ultimately, we hadn't seen that work during the first Trump administration. | ||
| And in previous periods when there's been higher taxes on Americans, we have seen economic collapse, like the Great Depression. | ||
| Not saying that Smoot Hawley back then was the only thing that caused the depression, but I believe it was a contributing factor from the research that's out there for contributing to this economic collapse, not only in America, but across the globe. | ||
| And if you look at the stock market, it's down about 15%, 20% for the NASDAQ, where it has a lot of tech firms. | ||
| And these are major costs to many Americans where more than 60% of Americans have stocks, have some ownership in these companies across the country. | ||
| And what this is telling me, and it should be telling others, is that there's a lost profitability across the economy here in America. | ||
| And so this is making a huge hit on Americans across the country. | ||
| If you'd like to join our conversation with Vance again, you can do so on our lines by party. | ||
| Republicans are on 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats are on 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents are on 202-748-8002. | ||
| You mentioned this earlier in the program, Vance, about the hollowing out of the Rush Belt. | ||
| And many people blame that and the loss of manufacturing in the United States to free trade agreements like NAFTA agreements with China. | ||
| What's your response to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, look, we've been told that for a number of years now. | |
| And so I think it's kind of settled into our mind, well, that must be the case. | ||
| But if you break it down and you look at the actual data, which I've done, is that this really started with employment. | ||
| So first thing I would say is that economic output, GDP, gross domestic product, that area of manufacturing output is hitting record highs. | ||
| So we have record highs in manufacturing output. | ||
| It's not like it's being declined or anything else. | ||
| The issue that people tend to have is that employment in manufacturing has been declining. | ||
| And so it's the employment side of things because what that means to me, you know, as economists is that we become more productive. | ||
| We're able to get more output from each individual worker as they've improved the manufacturing process over time. | ||
| But if you look at the employment, employment started to decline in manufacturing back in the 1950s and 1960s, well before NAFTA was passed in 1992 or when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. | ||
| You know, this was decades before that, that that sort of thing started happening where you started seeing decline in employment and manufacturing. | ||
| And so the real cause here was really because of increased productivity. | ||
| We had increases in automation, increases in innovation, better work environments for many of these manufacturing plants that were out there. | ||
| And many people decided, you know what, this business is this sort of job isn't for me. | ||
| I'm going to go somewhere else. | ||
| And another thing, though, is in the Rust Belt itself, when you think about Ohio and other places within that area where there used to be a lot of things manufactured and there still are things manufactured there, but many of much of the employment has declined. | ||
| You also have to look at the high taxes that were in those states, the high regulations, the high fees and push from unions that were raising minimum wages and raising the amount of cost of employing those workers. | ||
| And so whenever you lose profitability like that, the best thing for businesses to do in the manufacturing sector and other sectors is to go elsewhere to where you could be more profitable. | ||
| And that's what they did. | ||
| They went to the Sun Belt in places like Texas where I live or Florida or other places in the South is where you saw a lot of manufacturing went. | ||
| And then some of it also went to other countries. | ||
| I mean, that's where you could have it more, you know, be able to produce things cheaper and allow for more profitability. | ||
| And that's what we want. | ||
| In free market capitalism, you want more profitability. | ||
| You know, there's this question about, well, what's greedy or something else? | ||
| You know, who isn't greedy? | ||
| Is China not greedy or are we not greedy? | ||
| Everybody wants more of something. | ||
| So I guess Vance, the question would be not just greed, but unfairness, because there's a lot being said about other countries are just unfair to us and that we're balancing the playing field. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, so the idea there comes that they're charging a tariff on things that are exported to their countries, like in China or Mexico. | |
| And there's been a list of those tariffs that President Trump has put out recently. | ||
| But remember, tariffs are taxes on their people. | ||
| It's a tariff on the Chinese whenever they're importing from America. | ||
| It's not a tariff on Americans. | ||
| Now, one could argue, well, but that hurts our manufacturing because we're not able to export them. | ||
| But which way do we want it? | ||
| Do we want to be able to trade with the Chinese or not? | ||
| Because whenever we export something to them, we're also importing something from them. | ||
| So there's a back and forth trade. | ||
| And it's another thing that I think is often missed is that there's a current account deficit, meaning that goods and services, we export less in goods than we import. | ||
| And that's with a quote-unquote trade deficit. | ||
| But our services, we actually export more in services than we import. | ||
| So we have a trade surplus in services. | ||
| But that overall trade deficit, because goods are a greater amount than the services, is equal to our capital account surplus. | ||
| So when those goods go somewhere else, we pay for them in US dollars. | ||
| They can't really buy anything in China and many other countries with a dollar. | ||
| So they send those dollars back to the United States by buying many financial assets. | ||
| Stocks, bonds, our treasury securities, our bonds are there. | ||
| There's more demand because of that purchases of those over time. | ||
| And so that allows us to have lower interest rates than we otherwise would. | ||
| And so, this idea that they're tariffing us and so we should tariff them back, two wrongs don't make it right. | ||
| And so, I think what we should be doing instead is lowering our trade barriers, lowering the cost of doing business in America by cutting the corporate income taxes, making the Trump tax cuts permanent. | ||
| Those expire at the end of the year. | ||
| We really need that. | ||
| We need deregulation. | ||
| I mean, less spending by the federal government to reduce deficits, and that will definitely improve our trade situation as well. | ||
| All right, let's talk to callers, and we'll start with Tom in Mount Vernon, Ohio. | ||
| Line for Democrats, you're on with Vance Gin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thank you for taking my call. | |
| Here in Central Ohio, we were booming under Biden. | ||
| We had a chip factory going in New Albany, Ohio. | ||
| That's scratched. | ||
| $25 billion. | ||
| They say if it gets built by 2030, if. | ||
| The other day, we were it was announced Microsoft had planned three facilities in New Albany and Newark, Ohio. | ||
| They're all scrapped because of Trump, our dear darling leader. | ||
| He has ruined our country. | ||
| In his first administration, I guess it didn't end with COVID. | ||
| I guess COVID was all Biden's fault. | ||
| Everything after COVID was Biden's fault. | ||
| All the inflation was Biden's fault. | ||
| All the fact that we couldn't buy toilet paper was Biden's fault. | ||
| But Trump was fantastic. | ||
| Everything he does is fantastic. | ||
| Well, you know, he is out to ruin this country. | ||
| And I am just to my stomach sick because he has ruined my sense of optimism. | ||
| All right, we got your point. | ||
| Vance, your reaction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, I mean, this is an unfortunate situation. | |
| And we've heard about that not only in Ohio, but in other states where many of these firms are saying, look, we're not going to continue with this deal. | ||
| We're going to have to shut down because of the higher costs. | ||
| And whether you want to blame Biden, who I should note, also kept in tariffs that Trump had put in the first Trump administration. | ||
| He kept those tariffs in, and tariff revenue collections from Americans actually about doubled, almost tripled during the Biden's four years. | ||
| And so this wasn't like there wasn't then, but now we are seeing them get kind of on steroids on the amount of tariffs. | ||
| And when you have this kind of increases in costs, it's difficult for businesses to continue to profit, to remain in business. | ||
| And so many of them will shut down. | ||
| And this is one reason why I think tariffs is not the direction to go. | ||
| We should be looking at reducing the cost of doing business. | ||
| So one thing I think Trump does get right is focusing on pushing to lower spending through Doge and Elon Musk and others and looking at where can we find efficiencies within the federal government and then also extending and making permanent the tax cuts and jobs act because that would also be a huge hit on the economy if those expire at the end of this year which they're expected to do which is all the individual tax rates all of our individual tax rates that we pay would also go up by The end of the year. | ||
| And then also the deregulation that's happening. | ||
| If we can get more of that done and free trade with our allies, we'll be in a much better situation. | ||
| And I think those in Ohio and many other states across the country will be in a much better situation. | ||
| So, Vance, Tom did mention supply chain issues during COVID. | ||
| And a lot has been said that these tariffs on China could help decouple the U.S. economy from the Chinese economy so that we won't have those problems in the future. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the first thing I would say is I hope that we never shut down again. | |
| I think that was a mistake. | ||
| I don't think we should ever do that again. | ||
| And so that led to a lot of the other problems that we had with supply chain efforts. | ||
| But going on to what we're discussing now is it's very difficult for, like I was saying earlier, to substitute these things away. | ||
| Things that you get from one country doesn't automatically just come up in our country just because you slap tariffs on them. | ||
| This would take many years for those manufacturing plants to come online and everything else. | ||
| And maybe that's a cost worth taking. | ||
| But I don't think the hit to the economy and what we'll see in less economic output will be a good reason to continue to have tariffs in place. | ||
| Today, when these tariffs are in place in many of these countries and there is talk about a 90-day delay in many of these tariffs, except for maybe China, that was taken off the table and said, no, the Trump administration will continue with this sort of action. | ||
| And though we saw the stock markets continue to tumble down, go downward. | ||
| And so I don't think that this will decouple us overnight. | ||
| In fact, what we saw during COVID was that instead of buying things from China, we started buying things from Taiwan, Taiwan, and other countries that are out there. | ||
| And if we're also imposing such high costs through high tariffs on them as well, even with many of our trade partners, because there is a 10% minimum tariff on every country in the globe, even in places where very few people live, this is going to be much more destructive, I believe, than many of the, even some of the situations that we saw during COVID, because now we can't buy from anywhere else. | ||
| And how are you going to deal with that? | ||
| I think this is going to be an economic catastrophe that hopefully they will have cooler heads will prevail soon and say, you know what, this isn't worth it for Americans. | ||
| We've got to get back to having trade and making sure that we could be in the best situation for the future. | ||
| Here's David in Tennessee on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just wonder how much patience we can muster. | ||
| You know, people talk about that. | ||
| You know, they say they're going to build a new plant, Hyundai, for instance, going to build a new plant in America. | ||
| And that's a wonderful thing. | ||
| And it'll be a lot of jobs for building the plant, tooling the plan, running the plant. | ||
| But it takes time. | ||
| And, you know, that's not going to happen overnight. | ||
| I mean, the money's there. | ||
| The situation can come up and they can buy the land and everything and get it going. | ||
| But it's going to take time. | ||
| And people need to show their patience. | ||
| Rome wasn't built in a day, and this isn't going to happen overnight. | ||
| And you can't snap your fingers. | ||
| And if people will just take their time and stand back and look and say, okay, it's not going to, it may hurt me a little bit right now because I can't get my pencils the man talked about. | ||
| They may go up a nickel. | ||
| But eventually, somebody else, the country that another country other than China that builds pencils, that makes pencils, maybe Brazil that comes and makes the tariff right. | ||
| And we start buying our pencils from them. | ||
| You know, the price comes down. | ||
| Sorry, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every country falls in line. | |
| What do you think, Vance? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think David's onto something here. | |
| Not only will it take some time, but it will be higher cost. | ||
| And what will that cost mean if you have to fire workers because now your profitability has dropped as a business. | ||
| And one thing that we should mention here, which I think he was getting at, is about half the imports that we purchase from other countries are actually from businesses importing intermediate goods from other countries. | ||
| So a Ford plant in Ohio or Michigan or somewhere else would actually be using a lot of other parts to build that car, that F-150 or the Mustang. | ||
| Many of those parts come from other countries. | ||
| And so when you're raising tariffs, it's not just that it's raising tariffs on individual consumers. | ||
| It's also raising the cost on businesses. | ||
| And so, and about half of them, right, are businesses. | ||
| And so I think this is also a huge cost. | ||
| So not only will it take a long time, but it's going to be a huge cost. | ||
| And the other thing here is, you know, there's a lot of talk about how do we target China? | ||
| Because China has bad trade deals. | ||
| It's a communist country. | ||
| But the thing is, too, is that they're a communist country and they don't have elections. | ||
| They don't really care about their people as much as they would in America where you have elections. | ||
| And so they're okay with raising their own tariffs on their own people in order to continue to have this trade war with America. | ||
| And the problem with trade wars is they usually end in hot wars and violence and everything else. | ||
| And that's also what we don't want to see in America. | ||
| And instead, I hope that we can have better trade deals and agreements with China. | ||
| If China doesn't have a glimpse of what American capitalism, what we should have as capitalism, looks like and the amount of free trade, then how will they ever understand that it's better off to have a republic, have a democracy sort of situation where people can vote and have capitalism, where they can buy things and have a better life? | ||
| They saw that for many years until President Xi started to clamp down again. | ||
| You saw economic growth happen in China. | ||
| Since 1978, about a billion people moved out of poverty because they started opening up to the rest of the world, which indicates the goodness, the value that's created, the dignity and respect that comes with capitalism and opening up the trade. | ||
| And the more that we cut off with them and other countries, the further we're isolating them, the further that we're getting away from having diplomacy and having a more prosperous and peaceful world. | ||
| Vance, we got a text from Gary in Delaware who's asking you, does the government benefit from the income generated from the tariffs? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The government will receive more taxes. | |
| There are some estimates that it could be as much as high as $600 billion is what Peter Navarro has mentioned in new taxes that are collected from these tariffs. | ||
| I don't quite think it'll be that high because it also reduces your quantity demanded. | ||
| There's a trade-off, right? | ||
| Higher price, you have a downward sloping demand curve, you buy less. | ||
| And that's what I think we'll see. | ||
| So you won't see $600 billion. | ||
| But even the tax foundation shows that it could be $2.9 trillion more dollars in revenue over a decade. | ||
| So that's about $290 billion a year, about half of what Peter Navarro is estimating. | ||
| And so in that sense, there could be a benefit. | ||
| But remember, the government doesn't have money. | ||
| People do. | ||
| They take our money. | ||
| So this is a forced taking of our ability to consume items that we otherwise would buy at a cheaper price, at a better quality than otherwise. | ||
| And in particular, it hurts the lowest income Americans the most because they have the least amount of disposable income to be able to withstand, to be able to consume those higher prices. | ||
| And so that's what I'm really concerned about here is that we're going to continue to see less profitability by businesses. | ||
| And so the stock market will keep going down. | ||
| And we're going to see less opportunity for people because their prices keep going up and many jobs will be lost in the process. | ||
| Here's Alan, a Democrat in Crescent, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Hi, Alan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I got a question. | ||
| Instead of using tariffs to get the end result to bring manufacturing back here, why don't they use the tax code? | ||
| Because from what I've seen over the decades, the tax code was used to transfer those jobs to other countries. | ||
| These companies were getting tax benefits to move these factories offshore and then bring their goods in. | ||
| We basically import things that were made here. | ||
| Everything has an American name on it. | ||
| We're not going to Walmart and buying things off the shelf with Chinese or Vietnamese names on them. | ||
| It's American companies that moved and were incentivized to move offshore. | ||
| Why don't we use the tax code and say, hey, any finished product you bring and it hits these shores, you do not get a tax break for. | ||
| So no matter what it costs you to bring it onto the shores, you do not get to deduct that off of your income. | ||
| So you're going to pay as if that product cost you nothing to bring it here and that's all profit when you sell it. | ||
| Instead of what they're doing now, it's bringing things to the shore and saying, well, it cost us this much to bring it here on the shore. | ||
| And we're going to deduct that off of what we sold it for. | ||
| And it looks like we didn't make any money this year when they're making billions. | ||
| And that would eliminate the tariffs and the tariff war we're having right now. | ||
| All right, Alan. | ||
| Vance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, it's an interesting approach. | |
| I mean, I think that could be a way to do it in order to reduce that cost and incentivize more production here in America. | ||
| But what I would suggest is that we should have the broadest base and lowest rates possible that look more like a consumption type of tax versus an income tax or a picking winners and losers tax of you're going to be a winner if you only produce in here or and not and not and not getting goods and services from elsewhere. | ||
| Whether we like it or not, we're in a globalized world. | ||
| I happen to think that's a good thing. | ||
| That means that we have more consumers. | ||
| There are 7 billion people, I think, across the globe. | ||
| We've only got about 330 million in America. | ||
| So when you can open up to the rest of the world, you've got a lot more consumers for your items. | ||
| You've got more producers that can produce things. | ||
| And you've got more innovation and knowledge that's expanded across the globe, which is a beautiful thing. | ||
| And I hope that we can get back to understanding that free trade is so important in America and elsewhere. | ||
| But I hope that happens. | ||
| And I know President Trump has mentioned this some, is that if we could get to zero tariffs, right? | ||
| That's the goal to some extent. | ||
| Some of it's also reducing trade deficits and other things. | ||
| But if there is a way to get tariffs down to zero, then I'm all for that. | ||
| The problem with that is that I don't see that happening. | ||
| It didn't happen during the first Trump administration. | ||
| You know, the tariff rates kept being higher. | ||
| It hasn't happened in other periods. | ||
| And so from history and from economic theory, I don't see that that would be the end result. | ||
| But if it happens, then great. | ||
| That's what we should be looking for is reducing trade barriers because trade barriers hurt Americans, whether they're consumers, whether they're producers. | ||
| And it also hurts people in other places. | ||
| I think we should really be treating people like people and not saying, okay, well, they're in another country, so we don't want them to also benefit and they're not in America. | ||
| I'm for everyone prospering. | ||
| That's where I talk about a lot on my podcast, The Let People Prosper Show, and do a lot of other work at VanceGain.com to really helping people prosper. | ||
| And that's by reducing the cost of doing business. | ||
| By lowering taxes, deregulating, and cutting government spending and passing sustainable budgets, we could be in a much better situation. | ||
| And by the way, we should have free trade with our allies. | ||
| If we're going to start having more trade with other countries, we don't want to trade with China. | ||
| Why don't we trade with our allies more and reducing those trade barriers would be a huge step in that direction. | ||
| We've got this from Barb in Long Grove, Illinois, who says, Mr. Ginn stated that it would be better for the U.S. economy if no items were imported. | ||
| Unfortunately, too many lower and middle income families can only afford discount or dollar store items, many of which are imported from China. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I don't, I mean, I think that's a theoretical thing saying we don't import anything. | |
| My view is that we should be open to as many imports as people demand, and whether they're consumers or producers. | ||
| And so, because it does help the lowest income Americans, the most vulnerable across the economy, whether they buy it from Walmart, things that are made in China or elsewhere, when you start removing that, we are going to crush lower-income Americans, a lot of the middle class from that because of those higher costs of doing business and everything else. | ||
| And so, this is why we kind of going in full circle to what we were talking about earlier. | ||
| I think what we really need to think about is at the state, federal, and local levels in America, what can we be doing differently? | ||
| We like to point our finger at other countries and other people, but that means we have three more fingers that are pointing back at us. | ||
| We should be looking at what we can do internally to turn the table to allow for more economic growth and prosperity here in America. | ||
| And that's by lowering the cost here instead of blaming other countries or other people. | ||
| We've got a lot to do by ourselves of sustainable budgeting, cutting taxes, and deregulating. | ||
| And if we can do that, we'll be in a much more prosperous situation. | ||
| Here's Chris in Bonita Springs, Florida, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Okay, what you just said about lowering our costs, okay, it's kind of like osmosis, okay? | ||
| You've got a high concentration on one side and a low concentration on the other side, and a membrane in between. | ||
| The particles are going to go to the low side until it evens out. | ||
| Unfortunately, in places like China, they use slave labor, they have zero environmental regulations, no regulations per se. | ||
| Everything is set up to benefit the Communist Party. | ||
| And the Communist Party is the enemy of the United States. | ||
| They have nuclear weapons pointed at us. | ||
| They are in a long-term plan to rule the world. | ||
| If we want to sit back, make zero sacrifices so we don't have to pay an extra 50 cents per pair of tube socks, and we want to watch Chinese communist military buildup continue to the point where we have no choices, then we should continue on the path you suggest. | ||
| However, if we want to preserve this country, the freedoms that we've been given in the Constitution, the national security of this country, we have no choice but to start thinking long-term instead of corporate quarterly profits. | ||
| And people used to be able to afford things before this all started. | ||
| This was based on the greed of corporations and people who support this kind of thinking is the reason we're here now. | ||
| All right, Chris, let's get your response. | ||
| Go ahead, Vance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Thank you for the thank you for the comment. | ||
| I think what we've looked at here, and you talked about, you know, we're importing more here and China needs things and everything else. | ||
| And there is this connection that goes on with China. | ||
| But these actions that have been taken by one from the Biden administration of continuing to over-regulate the economy of nearly $2 trillion that were added in new regulations just during the Biden administration by the Inflation Reduction Act that was subsidizing wind and solar and getting us off, trying to get us off of oil and gas. | ||
| These were all raising the cost of doing business here at home, which was forcing things other places. | ||
| And so these are the same sort of costs that we're seeing now from tariffs. | ||
| And the thing that's happening now is that as we're putting tariffs on all these countries across the globe, these other countries are looking at where else can they buy their stuff from if they're not buying it from America. | ||
| And many of them are going to China. | ||
| So, in fact, this is emboldening China. | ||
| This is profiting China because of these actions because now many countries, Mexico, Europe, and other places are going to China to buy their stuff and not from America because we're raising our costs. | ||
| So, I agree with you that there are definitely concerns with China and there are definitely concerns with the Communist Party and the direction that they want to go. | ||
| I don't want us to go in that direction, but we're also forcing them more in that direction from our bad policies here at home, whether it's on energy policy, high taxes, high minimum wages, and forced labor and union dues. | ||
| These are the sort of things that are forcing things to other countries. | ||
| So, I really think we should look at more things we could do here in America to lower the cost of doing business. | ||
| And, you know, you mentioned greed. | ||
| I just, I just wonder who isn't greedy. | ||
| I think in some sense, we're all greedy, but we need to make sure that it's done in moderation. | ||
| And by allowing for more profitability for businesses, they can help lower-income workers, middle-income workers, and upper-income workers. | ||
| And so, we in America can benefit from having those lower costs of doing business here in America and stop forcing all these other countries and businesses to move to China in the process because we're a better place to do business. | ||
| So, America Inc. posted this to us on X. Mr. Ginn, do you believe a more measured approach, like focusing on competitive goods with respect to tariffs, would prevent people from losing their 401k savings? | ||
| Also, why is no one addressing the misuse of the formula they used to come up with the tariff percentages? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so the formula has pretty much been debunked. | |
| I mean, it was put in place, I guess, by some of the economists that were there. | ||
| I wouldn't have recommended that formula. | ||
| It's basically exports minus imports divided by imports. | ||
| And then there's two other these two other variables that just equal one. | ||
| So, it's really the percentage increase in the trade deficit, what that share is. | ||
| And that's where they come up. | ||
| And then they divide it by two in many cases, looking at what the actual tariff rate is going to be. | ||
| So, it's not reciprocal tariff where if you have a 50% tariff on your citizens for exporting our goods to them, we're going to put the same tariff of 50% on Americans for importing those items. | ||
| There wasn't a 50%, 50%. | ||
| It's usually 50% to 25%. | ||
| And so, it's not quite reciprocal. | ||
| And so, this whole trade formula issue comes about. | ||
| And look, if you want to have tariffs on competitive goods versus others, you're still just picking winners and losers. | ||
| You should really have something that's broad-based so that way we're not incentivizing one thing or the other. | ||
| The tax code is not meant to incentivize human behavior or any other actions. | ||
| It's only there to fund limited government spending. | ||
| And so, if we can get back to that, which is why we should start by cutting government spending, that's what's really out of control here and causing a lot of other problems in America. | ||
| We would be in a much better situation and having more economic growth and prosperity. | ||
| Because remember, when the government overspends, and they're running deficits, that would push up interest rates. | ||
| Higher interest rates means it's more costly for us to get cars and everything else. | ||
| And if China doesn't buy some of our debt and other countries don't buy our debt, then that's going to make interest rates higher than otherwise. | ||
| And then the Federal Reserve, our central bank, could come in and buy some of that debt, but that just increases the money supply and pushes up prices and inflation. | ||
| And so, we all pay for this in some capacity. | ||
| And the last thing, one other thing I wanted to say here was that when you have a tariff on a country, the dollar, the value of the dollar usually appreciates by that same amount to that country. | ||
| So, you don't see any change in the trade deficit. | ||
| It's why we didn't see huge changes in the trade deficit during the first Trump administration. | ||
| And we won't now because of these changes, unless they continue to hit Americans with higher and higher costs. | ||
| And we see the economy continue to collapse, then we will see less trade deficits because we can't purchase as much. | ||
| One reason why we have trade deficits is because we consume so much in America. | ||
| All right, that's Van Skin, former chief economist of OMB during the first Trump administration. | ||
| He's host of the podcast called Let People Prosper. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, thank you so much. | |
| It was a great conversation. | ||
| Later in the program, we'll talk to Washington State Democrat and physician Kim Schreier. | ||
| She'll join us in about 25 minutes to talk about healthcare policy in the Trump administration and other news of the day. | ||
| But first, it's open forum. | ||
| You can start calling now: Republicans 202748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independence 202-748-8002. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 features leading authors discussing their latest non-fiction books. | |
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| At 7 p.m. Eastern, journalist Michael Wolf provides his behind-the-scenes look at President Trump's 2024 re-election with his book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America. | ||
| And then at 8 p.m. Eastern, Bard College history professor Sean McMeekin talks about his book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, which was selected as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 2025 Conservative Book of the Year. | ||
| And at 9 p.m. Eastern, the New York Times's Annie Carney and Luke Broadwater, authors of Madhouse, chronicle the key events of the 118th Congress and the 2024 presidential election. | ||
| Then at 10 p.m. Eastern on Afterwards, Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford speaks about his faith, the challenges the country faces, and what he believes needs to happen to improve the country in his book, Turnaround: America's Revival. | ||
| He's interviewed by Wall Street Journal congressional reporter Siobhan Hughes. | ||
| Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story. | ||
| This weekend, beginning at 9:30 a.m. Eastern, all-day coverage of the 2024 Lincoln Forum held in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, authors and historians discuss Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War with presentations on Canada's role in the war, African-American reactions to Lincoln's death, and soldiers' motivations to fight. | ||
| At 7 p.m. Eastern, watch our American History TV series First 100 Days as we look at the start of presidential terms. | ||
| This week, we focus on the early months of President Donald Trump's first term in 2017, including the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement, promotion of the Keystone XL Pipeline Project, and construction of a border wall between the United States and Mexico. | ||
| And at 8 p.m. Eastern on Lectures in History, Santa Clara University history professor Sonia Gomez on the intimate relationships between people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds that occurred in Hawaii and Japan during and immediately after World War II. | ||
| Exploring the American story. | ||
| Watch American History TV Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history. | ||
| There are many ways to listen to C-SPAN radio anytime, anywhere. | ||
| In the Washington, D.C. area, listen on 90.1 FM. | ||
| Use our free C-SPAN Now app or go online to c-span.org/slash radio on SiriusXM radio on channel 455, the TuneIn app, and on your smart speaker by simply saying play C-SPAN radio. | ||
| Hear our live call-in program, Washington Journal, daily at 7 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| Listen to House and Senate proceedings, committee hearings, news conferences, and other public affairs events live throughout the day. | ||
| And for the best way to hear what's happening in Washington with fast-paced reports, live interviews, and analysis of the day. | ||
| Catch Washington today, weekdays of 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| Listen to C-SPAN programs on C-SPAN Radio anytime, anywhere. | ||
| c-span democracy unfiltered c-spanshop.org is c-spans online store Browse through our latest collection of C-SPAN products, apparel, books, home decor, and accessories. | ||
| There's something for every C-SPAN fan, and every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations. | ||
| Shop now or anytime at c-span shop.org. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| It is Open Forum, and we will go to your calls shortly. | ||
| I just wanted to flag a couple of things for your schedule for later today. | ||
| At 10 a.m., so right after this program, we will take you over to the Senate Commerce Committee. | ||
| They consider the nomination of Jared Isaacman to be Administrator of NASA and Olivia Trustee to be a member of the Federal Communications Commission. | ||
| We'll have live coverage of that starting at 10 a.m. Eastern right here on C-SPAN. | ||
| You can also see that on the app and online. | ||
| And also at 10 a.m., U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer is on Capitol Hill for a second day to testify on President Trump's trade and tariff policies before the House Ways and Means Committee. | ||
| You can watch that hearing live on C-SPAN 3, also on the app and online. | ||
| The House comes in today at 12 noon. | ||
| Of course, we'll have gavel-to-gavel coverage as usual here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Let's go to the phones now to Len in Wilson, North Carolina, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Len. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I want to say, I want to, my thing is, we got to look at how did we get here. | ||
| Now, if you look back, it's the Republicans that got us here. | ||
| You look back at George Bush, the New World Order. | ||
| I would challenge C-SPAN to go back in the archives and play something on that. | ||
| But they were pushing for China's most favorite nation, China, trade, free trade for their rich buddies because they could go over there and make it for nothing. | ||
| And, you know, this is, you know, when you look at how we got here, these same people are telling us that they can solve the problem. | ||
| Now, Clinton did, Bill Clinton, a lot of people are going to say, well, Bill Clinton signed on to it. | ||
| He did because he had the Mono Lewinsky thing, and he had to compromise with the Republicans, but the Democrats knew better than this. | ||
| And you go back and you look at who started all this stuff and for their rich buddies. | ||
| Also, ask yourself the question, Charl and C-SPAN, who gets the money when we run these deficits and everything. | ||
| Somebody's got to be making that money. | ||
| If I go there and gamble at the gambling house and I lose all this money, where the house gets the money. | ||
| So who is getting this money? | ||
| Because a lot of Republicans had said before in the past that deficits was good. | ||
| So rich people making money off these deficits. | ||
| All right, Lenny. | ||
| And here's Stephen, Indianapolis, Indiana, a Democrat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Morning, Stephen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm comments about the tariffs. | |
| Excuse me? | ||
| I said, sure, go right ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I got a speaker phone, so let me get off speaker phone. | ||
| Okay, with these tariffs, they're going to bring back jobs like button manufacturing. | ||
| And what's that going to pay? | ||
| $5 an hour? | ||
| And I've heard a comment about making pencils a few times now. | ||
| And making pencils, the product to produce a pencil comes from many different countries. | ||
| Imagine how many different countries are involved to produce a vehicle. | ||
| So one last thing here. | ||
| I'll give about the tax breaks. | ||
| Back when Bush did it, I received $8 more an hour a week. | ||
| Excuse me, I mean, an hour a week. | ||
| But the owner got over a million dollars in tax revenue. | ||
| And did I get a raise? | ||
| No. | ||
| He bought CNC machines, which replaced me and many others. | ||
| So that's my comment, and you have a good day on. | ||
| And here's Robert, a Republican in Welches, Oregon. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning to you. | |
| This is actually alluding to the past hour when you had Mr. Gin on speaking about the tariff imposition. | ||
| I care to say that the colloquy with him between him and some of the callers neglected, or he really didn't get in so much to the fact that the tariffs, even now, appear to be certainly on the verge of being somewhat transitory. | ||
| We have nations that had a very, very steep tariff against the United States getting on the phone, getting on the plane, and trying to rectify things. | ||
| And I think this is just an ongoing dynamic that we're going to see here. | ||
| I think it's a bit premature for anybody to know how the tariffs will affect the economy. | ||
| And, Robert, is that because you don't think that the tariffs are here to stay? | ||
| You think that this is just negotiating to get countries to come to the table and make concessions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thank you for that. | |
| It somewhat begs the question, but I don't know. | ||
| But I do see that. | ||
| And I see it not what I, you know, my speculation as to where this is, what's on the dynamic, but if anything informs us, it's that President Trump engages in these ploys sometimes to get, you know, as a dynamic to move things ahead. | ||
| Now, you might not agree with it, and you might think that it's insufferable as far as how much it will the expense and so forth. | ||
| But I think it's a bit early to say that, oh, my God, it's going to, you know, these are set in stone and it's going to destroy us in four years or two, two months from now. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Okay, Robert. | ||
| We're going to talk to Jim now in Rosanke, Texas, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
| You know, one thing people haven't thought about, when was the last time you saw a parent tell their young kid grow up to be president? | ||
| I haven't heard that in the longest. | ||
| From the first round on Trump, he destroyed it. | ||
| I respect the position. | ||
| I don't respect the person. | ||
| I used to be Republican until the first part of the pandemic, and he turned in a press conference into a political deal. | ||
| And, you know, things are bad. | ||
| What I'm calling in about really is I'm about ready to start a house. | ||
| Very not anything huge or anything, but I would be stupid if I started a house right now. | ||
| And the other thing is, am I going to be even able to sell the property I'm presently at? | ||
| And it ripples down through the whole deal. | ||
| The carpenters, the electricians, everyone. | ||
| You know, I can't go up there and tell that builder I'm ready to go. | ||
| You know, and I'm the small guy. | ||
| Think about the big businesses. | ||
| They're doing the same thing, but on a larger scale. | ||
| You have a good day. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Richard, Oceanside, California, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello? | |
| Hi, Richard. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, hi. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
| I got a little bit of a flu going and my ears are a bit jammed up. | ||
| But it's almost gone. | ||
| Point is that the last presenter that you had earlier, Jen, I think how you pronounce it possibly. | ||
| Jen Gaffer. | ||
| He was with the former Trump administration as an economist. | ||
| And then the lady from Florida that called in was absolutely right. | ||
| I thought you cannot beat the red Chinese. | ||
| You just can't beat them. | ||
| There's too many of them, too big of a place. | ||
| They've been there for thousands of years. | ||
| The Americans lost to them in North Korea. | ||
| The Americans lost to them in North Vietnam. | ||
| And if Trump starts a trade war with them, we will lose that trade war. | ||
| And they will not give up. | ||
| Those people will never give up. | ||
| The Japanese couldn't beat them. | ||
| Nobody can beat those guys. | ||
| So Trump best back off on that one. | ||
| And a lot of the other policies that he has, he is not doing things right. | ||
| Management by sledgehammer and machete is not the way to run this country. | ||
| So he best smart enough, but we're going to be in real trouble. | ||
| That's all I got to say. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Here's Alex, Washington, D.C., Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, thanks for taking my call. | |
| I actually think what the last caller said is exactly the point that your last guest was making. | ||
| It's essentially the same argument. | ||
| It's a defeatist argument that we just can't win and we shouldn't try. | ||
| I think that C-SPAN should look for better guests overall. | ||
| And I guess what I'm saying is that what you really looked at over the last 20 years is the Walmartification of the American economy, right? | ||
| Where everyone understood when Walmart started up that it was cheap goods and that they didn't pay people well and that it was going to be bad for any community that it moved into. | ||
| And that is the model that we've adopted across our whole country. | ||
| Now we ship in cheap goods from other countries and we pay people minimum wage to basically sell those goods with their gig workers. | ||
| And it's only going to end one way. | ||
| It's going to end with more and more people getting pushed where they can only subsist on these extremely cheap goods until eventually we can't pay our debts anymore. | ||
| And that will happen when we lose our global reserve currency status. | ||
| And if you had somebody on that could explain these things to people, I think they would start to understand that we are in a tough situation, but the time to act is now because if you don't act, you're on a slope that's going to end in disaster. | ||
| The other thing is I think you should, the national security side of it, what the woman from Florida said is 100% correct. | ||
| There are videos online of a Chinese professor saying the way that we sort things out is that we essentially have our friends at the top of Wall Street and in politics. | ||
| And that's 100% true. | ||
| A gentleman called in and he said, where does all the deficit money go to? | ||
| And the answer is, well, it goes to China and then China reinvests it in Wall Street and they use it to buy real estate here in America. | ||
| And that's the dirty secret. | ||
| And if you guys wanted to explain these things to folks, I think their perspectives would change. | ||
| It would at least take away a lot of the callers who call and say, I have no idea what's going on. | ||
| And there's a motivation in Wall Street and in the media to essentially say, oh, this is all insane. | ||
| There's no over, there's no rationale to it. | ||
| But there is a rationale. | ||
| And I think even if people aren't aware of the sort of the more intricate details of it, they see it every day when they realize, hey, I can only afford cheap stuff. | ||
| What happened to the good jobs that my parents had? | ||
| All of those things. | ||
| We appreciate your input. | ||
| And Annette is in Roosevelt, New York, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, hi. | |
| Hi. | ||
| Anyone make a comment, first of all, that here's this guy before me. | ||
| I had something else to say, but he discusses about other people and how they think. | ||
| Would you have someone run your business who is actually filed bankruptcy six times? | ||
| You'd put him in charge of running America. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And you think America is not going to go bankrupt? | ||
| That's only a question out there. | ||
| And what the real thing I wanted to discuss is something nobody's talked about. | ||
| America's isolation. | ||
| Is this guy trying to isolate America and the perception of the world, how they see America? | ||
| That is what I would like discussed. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And Ken in Winterhaven, Florida, Republican line, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| First, I'd like to at least say that I sure appreciate C-SPAN. | ||
| And thank God you're not federally funded, or Trump would probably shut you down. | ||
| But as far as these tariffs go, I think everybody's kind of missing the point here. | ||
| It never had to happen in the first place. | ||
| If there were serious concerns about trade deficits, Trump could have simply stated to the world that he wanted to renegotiate things in advance of just announcing these incredible, ridiculous tariffs. | ||
| But right now it looks like he's trying to blackmail every other country in the world, while he's also blackmailing organizations and people off the street and shipping them out of the country with no opportunity to dispute | ||
| that. | ||
| that. | ||
| I think it's all part of a massive mega-oligarchy criminal enterprise for Trump's benefit, his family's benefit, other oligarchies' benefit, why corporations are bending over, lawyer firms bending over, countries bending over. | ||
| I think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. | ||
| You know, the biggest problem here is that the Supreme Court gave him absolute immunity. | ||
| That basically renders the Supreme Court irrelevant. | ||
| It almost renders the Congress irrelevant. | ||
| He can do any damn thing he wants, and nobody can stop him until the Supreme Court reverses that absolute, absurd, absolute immunity ruling. | ||
| Most ridiculous thing I ever heard in my life. | ||
| Got it, Ken. | ||
| Here's Steve, an independent in Avila, Pennsylvania. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mamie. | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd like to offer a cautionary tale about the tariffs, the way this heavy-handed way that tariffs are being implemented Back in the early 60s, the United Steelworkers were going to bring Big Steel to their knees. | |
| They went on strike. | ||
| During that strike, the automakers imported Japanese steel. | ||
| They were going to get their goods from someplace else. | ||
| And that started, that started the collapse of Big Steel. | ||
| I worked in Big Steel. | ||
| I lost my job because of imports, but fortunately, I'm a journeyman with papers. | ||
| I was able to get employment elsewhere. | ||
| But we're not going to win this battle. | ||
| They think that these other countries that we're going to bring to our knees, they're going to have options, and they're already getting their backs up against the United States and their economic policies. | ||
| They're going to buy from us as long as they have to until they find somewhere else. | ||
| And then we'll be just that much off. | ||
| We'll be just that much worse off. | ||
| I just don't understand what's going on in politics. | ||
| All right, Steve. | ||
| Let's talk to Horace in Sherwood, Arkansas. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| Thanks for C-SPAN. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I think these are just a bunch of diversions that Trump, which I call Orange Man, is putting out here because he couldn't do what he said he was going to do with Putin and Ukraine or with Israel and the Palestinians. | ||
| So these just diversions because he couldn't do what he said he was going to do. | ||
| So he gets you thinking about something else so he don't have to look bad in what he couldn't accomplish. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| All right, Horace. | ||
| And that's it for today's open forum. | ||
| But there is more to come on the program. | ||
| We have Washington State Democrat Kim Schreier. | ||
| She's a physician and she'll discuss healthcare policy in the Trump administration, other news of the day. | ||
| Later, Bipartisan Policy Center Vice President William Hoaglin discusses Republican efforts to pass a budget blueprint to advance the White House's legislative agenda. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN Student Camp Competition challenged middle and high school students nationwide to create documentaries with messages to the new president. | |
| Our panel of judges evaluated over 1,700 thought-provoking student films on their use of multiple perspectives. | ||
| C-SPAN awarded $100,000 in total cash prizes, and our grand prize of $5,000 goes to Dermot Foley, a 10th grader from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. | ||
| Congratulations to all our winners. | ||
| The top 21 winning entries will air on C-SPAN this month. | ||
| You can also watch all the award-winning documentaries anytime at studentcam.org. | ||
| C-SPAN, Bringing New Democracy, Unfiltered. | ||
| Nonfiction Book Lovers, C-SPAN has a number of podcasts for you. | ||
| Listen to best-selling nonfiction authors and influential interviewers on the Afterwords podcast and on Q ⁇ A. Hear wide-ranging conversations with the non-fiction authors and others who are making things happen. | ||
| And BookNotes Plus episodes are weekly hour-long conversations that regularly feature fascinating authors of nonfiction books on a wide variety of topics. | ||
| Find all of our podcasts by downloading the free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts and on our website, c-span.org/slash podcasts. | ||
| Looking to contact your members of Congress? | ||
| Well, C-SPAN is making it easy for you with our 2025 Congressional Directory. | ||
| Get essential contact information for government officials all in one place. | ||
| This compact, spiral-bound guide contains bio and contact information for every House and Senate member of the 119th Congress. | ||
| Contact information on congressional committees, the President's Cabinet, federal agencies, and state governors. | ||
| The Congressional Directory costs $32.95 plus shipping and handling, and every purchase helps support C-SPAN's non-profit operations. | ||
| Scan the code on the right or go to c-spanshop.org to pre-order your copy today. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back to the program. | ||
| We're joined now by Representative Kim Schreier of Washington, a Democrat, a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and also co-chair of the Congressional Doctors Caucus. | ||
| Congresswoman, welcome to the program. | ||
| Thank you, Mimi. | ||
| Talk about your background in medicine. | ||
| You're the first pediatrician in Congress, and you co-chair, as I just mentioned, the Congressional Doctors Caucus. | ||
| Well, before running for Congress, I practiced medicine, pediatrics, in my community, and it was quite a switch to go from the exam room to the House of Representatives. | ||
| But it's been really important, I think, to bring the voice of a pediatrician, the voice of a woman doctor, and given everything that's been happening in healthcare, that perspective has been really important. | ||
| Speaking of everything that's happening in healthcare, I want to start with the cuts at the HHS. | ||
| The Doge, the administration, has started making those cuts. | ||
| Here's the Wall Street Journal with the headline: RFK Jr. plans 10,000 job cuts in major restructuring of the health department. | ||
| What do we know right now about the roles of those people that have been cut so far? | ||
| Well, these cuts to our finest institutes of research, to the FDA that keeps our food safe, our drugs safe, that approves innovative therapies. | ||
| These cuts have been outrageous and reckless and seemingly just really thoughtless. | ||
| We're seeing the firings run the whole gamut from people involved in basics and basic science to people who have been there for decades and are experts in their fields and are really the brain trust of these great institutions. | ||
| It is kneecapping research, development, drug approval, food safety in our country. | ||
| And I don't know how easy it will be, if at all, to reverse those cuts. | ||
| I'll just put some numbers up on the screen of those cuts at the HHS. | ||
| Here is Food and Drug Administration, 3,500 people have been cut. | ||
| The CDC, 2,400 people. | ||
| The NIH, National Institutes of Health, 1,200. | ||
| And Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services at 300 people. | ||
| The argument, of course, is that there's a lot of fat and redundancy in federal agencies, and we're not getting rid of the people that are doing important work, but the extraneous, I guess, employees. | ||
| Well, that's just plain wrong. | ||
| And first of all, in our committee, we do oversight for all of these agencies. | ||
| And the bottom line that we hear all the time is that the agencies are actually understaffed. | ||
| They're having trouble keeping up with the pipeline of innovative therapies in order to speed those drugs to market, immunizations to market, and make sure that we are inspecting foods like baby formula. | ||
| Sometimes more efficiency requires more staffing. | ||
| And this is doing exactly the opposite. | ||
| Really, it is going to handicap our leadership in the world. | ||
| You mentioned research. | ||
| What is the role of the federal government in health-related research? | ||
| Well, the federal government is the primary funder of research. | ||
| So when you think about research happening at our great universities across the country, if you think of research at places like in my district, it's University of Washington, it's Children's Hospital, Seattle Children's, or Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, that research is in good part funded by NIH grants. | ||
| And so I just want to explain really on a granular level. | ||
| Let's say there is a research project going on about a particular cancer drug. | ||
| All of a sudden, funds are withheld. | ||
| Say a woman is part of that study is scheduled to get her next dose of chemotherapy and it has to be paused. | ||
| That pause ruins the study because now the treatments aren't given on time. | ||
| And so as we see this cascade across the country, as we're kneecapping the research that brings us the most innovative treatments in the world, not only are our universities going to suffer, our country and the entire world will suffer. | ||
| Can that research be done by the private sector? | ||
| Why would that research need to be funded by the American taxpayer? | ||
| Well, the private sector can do some of this, but really it's a partnership. | ||
| And usually what happens is that the bench work gets done with funding from the NIH, and then the ideas go to a pharmaceutical company, for example, for clinical trials. | ||
| It is a partnership that is indispensable. | ||
| It is how things have happened in this country. | ||
| And really, it is one of the wisest investments the federal government can make. | ||
| I want to play for you a clip of HHS Secretary RFK Jr. discussing his plans to reduce staff at his agency and get your reaction. | ||
| Our key services delivered through Medicare and Medicaid, the FDA and CDC and other agencies will enter a new era of responsiveness and a new era of effectiveness. | ||
| We're going to consolidate all of these departments and make them accountable to you, the American taxpayer, and the American patient. | ||
| These goals will honor the aspirations of the vast majority of existing HHS employees who actually yearn to make America healthy. | ||
| 28 great divisions will become 15. | ||
| The entire federal workforce is downsizing now, so this will be a painful period for HHS as we downsize from 82,000 full-time employees to around 62,000. | ||
| We're keenly focused on paring away excess administrators while increasing the number of scientists and frontline health providers so that we can do a better job for the American people. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
| Well, it's outrageous. | ||
| I mean, he's throwing out words like, you know, we're going to cut, we're going to make this more efficient, and that it's not the scientists who are being dismissed. | ||
| But that's not true. | ||
| Scientists showed up for work at the FDA only to find out that their key cards didn't work. | ||
| So he can say whatever he wants there, but the reality is that, I mean, he just admitted that these are incredible people committed to their work, and yet he's firing 20 to 25 percent of them. | ||
| So what he's doing is misguided and reckless, and as any carpenter will tell you, measure twice, cut once, and that's not what they're doing. | ||
| Their best scientists and most experienced scientists are either being fired or threatened with firing if they don't stick with RFK Jr.'s party line, which is not medically based. | ||
| And we're losing people like Peter Marks. | ||
| I want to talk about vaccines, but first we'll let people know that if you'd like to join our conversation with Representative Kim Schreier, a Democrat of Washington, you can do so. | ||
| Our lines are biparty. | ||
| Republicans are on 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats are on 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents on 202748-8002. | ||
| We also have a line for medical professionals. | ||
| If you'd like to call in, that line is 202-748-8003. | ||
| I want to show you a headline from the Huffington Post. | ||
| He's full of blank. | ||
| Pediatrician in Congress, that's you, blames RFK Jr. for child's death from measles. | ||
| This is from February when there was only the one child who had died. | ||
| Now there's a second child unvaccinated who has died. | ||
| Quote, I do blame him and others like him who for the past 20 years have been spreading lies about vaccines. | ||
| I absolutely put the responsibility on him. | ||
| For 20 years, he has been sowing doubt about vaccines, about proven safety and efficacy. | ||
| He's been making parents scared to vaccinate their children, and that has led directly to communities under vaccinating and now the spread of measles. | ||
| We have now over 600 people in this country who have been infected. | ||
| This is still spreading. | ||
| Two children have died. | ||
| And first of all, let me just say it's a miserable illness. | ||
| I think people sometimes think it's just a rash. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| I've taken care of one child who was too young to be vaccinated, who had measles. | ||
| She was miserable. | ||
| Fevers of 104, crying, awful throat pain, awful ear pain, cough, shortness of breath, and then the rash appeared. | ||
| And so these are kids who are suffering needlessly because their parents were scared away from vaccinating by RFK Jr. and his ilk. | ||
| Now in his defense, he is saying now that parents should vaccinate their children for measles. | ||
| Well, I mean, he was clearly told to say that. | ||
| He said that, and then immediately afterwards backtracked and said he thinks doctors should be treating measles with therapies that are not proven to work for measles. | ||
| For example, measles is a virus and you cannot treat a virus with antibiotics. | ||
| So he continues to churn misinformation and sow doubt. | ||
| And he continues to make money, by the way, off of a lawsuit against the company that makes the HPV vaccine, which is a vaccine that prevents cancer. | ||
| How can parents be completely sure, though, that vaccines are safe for their children? | ||
| Because there are a lot of parents out there that are scared. | ||
| There are a lot of parents who are scared. | ||
| And as a pediatrician, I worked with those parents and families all the time. | ||
| Now, first of all, I will say that the reason they're scared is because of RFK Jr., Jenny McCarthy, and others sowing doubt. | ||
| But I think we all get nervous about any medical treatment. | ||
| And that's why you have a physician, you have a pediatrician to sit down with, express your worries and your doubts, and hear from that doctor about why it's important to look at the risks and the benefits, to talk about the proven science, and to talk to somebody who you trust, if you trust your pediatrician with your newborn baby, you can trust that discussion. | ||
| Let's talk to callers now. | ||
| We'll start with Chris in Arlington, Virginia, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Chris. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, can you hear me? | |
| Yes, go right ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, great. | |
| Hi, Congresswoman. | ||
| I'm one of the federal employees that was laid off from one of the federal statistical agencies. | ||
| Basically, they essentially abolished it by eliminating all the staff. | ||
| And I just see this trend in these moves that are being made early in this administration to get rid of people like me who have good scientific knowledge and background. | ||
| Our work that we had worked on is decades old. | ||
| I mean, these are long longitudinal surveys. | ||
| They're sample surveys, cross-sectional surveys. | ||
| And I just can hardly sleep at night because I'm often woken up in the middle of the night thinking, oh my God, I've been there for 35 years, and everything that we've been doing all those years is going into basically a trash heap. | ||
| I don't know how they can maintain it with no staff. | ||
| So I guess I wanted to just bring this up in this forum to sort of point out kind of what these drastic cuts mean. | ||
| And I'm sure for medical research, it's going to have a huge impact. | ||
| And you're never going to get people to want to do these jobs again, young people that we were hoping to bring in, you know, because I was going to retire anyways at some point, right? | ||
| All right, Chris. | ||
|
unidentified
|
People aren't going to want to do those jobs, right? | |
| Let's hear from the Congresswoman. | ||
| Well, Chris, first of all, thank you for calling. | ||
| And I'm so sorry that you have lost your job. | ||
| And I think you painted the exact picture of the value of federal employees who, you know, you said you're awake at night, not worried about your own well-being. | ||
| You're worried about the work you've been doing, about how your country is going to be served with you not there and with others discouraged to go seek out federal employment. | ||
| And I think that you just painted the exact picture of a civil servant who is in there likely taking a lower salary with a federal government job in order to serve. | ||
| And you pointed out exactly the point here that these are reckless cuts, that we are losing decades of work, we're losing a brain trust, and that these widespread random firings are making people who are working for the federal government consider going elsewhere and certainly making new up-and-coming scientists and experts less likely to put all their eggs in the federal basket right now. | ||
| Here's Dexter in Cincinnati, Ohio, Republican lying. | ||
| Good morning, Dexter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you know, we have a big problem with pharmaceuticals and their capture of NIH and FDA and CDC. | |
| You know, we've really lost a lot of confidence and they're really doing for us. | ||
| We paid for this research and then the pharmaceuticals really take all that research that we paid for and then the U.S. pays top dollar. | ||
| And really, how much are you really getting from pharmaceuticals? | ||
| Do they contribute to you? | ||
| So I think maybe Dexter's question was asking me personally if I benefit from pharmaceutical companies. | ||
| And I'm going to give you a slightly cheeky response back, which is that I have type 1 diabetes and I would not be alive without insulin that is made by pharmaceutical companies. | ||
| But I think that, you know, really what you're getting at here is that we are paying three to four times more for the medications in this country than others around the world pay for their medications. | ||
| And that is not fair. | ||
| It is a reason that I have called out specifically the cost of insulin. | ||
| Over the past 20, 25 years, the same insulin I use has gone from about $40 a bottle, and mind you, a bottle is two teaspoons, up to north of $300 a bottle. | ||
| And that's why we, Democrats in Congress, took on that industry to bring down insulin to $35 a month for seniors on Medicare, and that has had cascading effects. | ||
| It is also why Democrats and Republicans on my committee are joining forces to take on pharmacy benefit managers. | ||
| These are the middlemen who jack up prices because they have perverse incentives to make retail prices as high as they can so they get paid for the amount they bring those costs down for insurance companies. | ||
| So I want to just emphasize that I agree with you that we are paying too much for those medications. | ||
| And I also want to emphasize that I am taking on that industry to make sure that your medications that you depend on are affordable for you. | ||
| The president has teased more tariffs coming, especially for the pharmaceutical industry. | ||
| Do you think that will help or hurt American patients? | ||
| So we need to have a robust pharmaceutical manufacturing infrastructure here. | ||
| We're seeing shortages of things like saline, amoxicillin, that are basic medications and that there is very little financial incentive for American companies to make. | ||
| So we do need another partnership between the federal government and pharmaceutical manufacturing so that we can meet our needs. | ||
| It's a national security issue. | ||
| That said, we need diversified supply chains. | ||
| We can't have it all coming from China, for example. | ||
| That puts us in a very precarious situation. | ||
| So I think there should be some onshoring. | ||
| There should also be the recognition that we need duplication of efforts so that we're not reliant on one place. | ||
| And there should also be recognition that anything made in the United States in terms of pharmaceuticals will likely cost more than something coming from India, for example. | ||
| Let's talk to Tim in Gashville, Arkansas, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| Can you hear me okay? | ||
| Yes, go right ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I have a comment, and then at the end, I have a poem, if you'll allow me. | |
| But to the representative, you spoke about trust for the trust and just for the pharmaceutical companies. | ||
| You got pharmaceutical companies. | ||
| You talked about public partnership, but the taxpayer ends up with the bill, and it goes on since we don't do everything by borrowing. | ||
| It goes on the national debt. | ||
| We got $37 trillion worth of partnerships, but the universities and the pharmaceutical companies are the ones that reap the rewards. | ||
| You talked about trusting them, trusting your pediatrician, but when you got the pediatrics, The American Board of Pediatrics talking about affirming gender instead of telling kids, no, you're born this way, and you'll grow out of this impulse. | ||
| You can't trust them. | ||
| When they create stuff like Ozempic, instead of telling people that to eat better, they're going to put you on something you stab in your belly every day. | ||
| The previous caller asked you about if you were supported. | ||
| I think he meant do they donate to you, not do you take drugs. | ||
| But the government, yes, way too bloated. | ||
| A 25% reduction. | ||
| We got AI now. | ||
| We're not going to have any problem administering anything. | ||
| And if I could just, you're welcome to ask many questions, but if I could, I just end with my poem. | ||
| Okay, really quick, Tim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wrote this the day after the election. | |
| There's no need to fear the Donald's win is crystal clear. | ||
| With popular vote well in hand, a calm can settle across the land. | ||
| But Dems being the way they are, they'll claw and tear a festering scar. | ||
| Their hate and anger they will project. | ||
| Their crimes and corruption, they will protect. | ||
| They would judge this country worthy of heck just to rail against the president-elect. | ||
| All right, Tim. | ||
| Go ahead, Congresswoman, your response to him. | ||
| Did you say that he was an independent? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| He's definitely a Trump cheerleader. | ||
| Okay, so first, here's what I would say: you should trust your pediatrician when it comes to the well-being of children. | ||
| And I want to reassure you that I believe, as I do with so many other topics when it comes to medicine and treatments, that health care decisions should be made between health care professionals and parents and children, and that government, Congress, and politicians ought to keep their nose out of it. | ||
| The second thing I wanted to say was that I trust the physicians and the pediatricians and the families more at this point than I trust AI to make these decisions because I don't know if you happen to be on Medicare, but we are seeing with Medicare Advantage plans that insurance companies are abusing AI. | ||
| I am hearing from patients and from physicians and hospitals that there are record numbers of needs for pre-authorizations, which basically is insurance companies trying to deny or delay care, or even post-procedure denials, which is based on basically turning the dial on AI to deny care for everybody and put more money in insurance companies' pockets. | ||
| And so we need a combination of smart use of technology with human oversight. | ||
| And that is what I'm looking to achieve. | ||
| I also want to emphasize, and I've said it before, we all want our tax dollars, and I pay them too. | ||
| We all want our tax dollars spent wisely and to our benefit. | ||
| And so we're all looking for efficiency. | ||
| But again, measure twice and cut once. | ||
| And sometimes more efficiency actually means hiring up more people to get the job done. | ||
| And a New York State Democrat, good morning, Anne. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and many thanks to C-SPAN for allowing me to meet you, Representative. | |
| I love that you are a pediatrician. | ||
| We need more physicians, I think, in government. | ||
| And I love your attitude of advocacy, which I know you show to your pediatric patients. | ||
| From my perspective, I have qualified. | ||
| I don't have the diagnosis, but I have qualified for a study on Alzheimer's disease. | ||
| And I go in to a renowned medical center near where I live every other week for infusions. | ||
| This is a long-term study of four years. | ||
| And just the thought that that could be cut not only is a loss to me personally, but a loss to future generations in our society who could really benefit from combating this horrible, horrible disease that runs in my family and many others. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Alzheimer's disease, as is cancer, as is many others, is equal opportunity. | |
| You can be a Republican and still get that and benefit from research. | ||
| So I appreciate everything you're doing, Representative, to advocate for us and to keep this research going. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for calling in with that comment. | ||
| And I am sorry that you do have that family history. | ||
| And I am so grateful to you for participating in the research that may not only help you, but help generations to come because this disease is terrible. | ||
| It robs people of their brains, of their personalities. | ||
| And none of us want to go down that path. | ||
| And so this is a perfect example that you bring up of why really as Americans, we should be supporting NIH-funded research because that is how these studies are coming about that will save so many Americans from and people around the world from that fate. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| Thank you for your kind comments. | ||
| As you know, we're 36 trillion in debt. | ||
| Where do you see possibilities for cost savings, for spending cuts? | ||
| It is true. | ||
| Our debt is out of control and it needs to be addressed and it needs to be addressed in a very thoughtful way. | ||
| And just to put a finer point on that, it's become a national security issue. | ||
| Like we're spending as much on interest on that debt as we are on defense every year. | ||
| And that is only growing. | ||
| And so yes, we do need to tighten our belt buckles and we also need to think about revenue. | ||
| It needs to come from both places. | ||
| Frankly, I think it would be a great idea, and I'm working with several of my colleagues to do this, in addition to having a State of the Union address, to also have a financial state of the union address to a joint session of Congress so that we're all on the same page, | ||
| that we hear from experts, from conservatives, from liberals, from experts in the field from all different vantage points, a unified conversation about what needs to be done so that we can all step up and make those hard decisions. | ||
| I heard what you said about revenue on the cut side. | ||
| Do you have ideas as to what can be cut out of the budget? | ||
| This is one where I would say study first, but here's what I would say. | ||
| We are blessed with technology and computer systems. | ||
| And so we should be able to streamline, as one of our guests just asked about, some of our processes. | ||
| In fact, I have heard from people who are on SNAP, food stamps, and Medicaid and school meals and assistance for needy families. | ||
| Why can't there just be one joint application? | ||
| Why can't this get figured out behind the scenes? | ||
| They see my 1040 tax returns. | ||
| They know I'm eligible. | ||
| These are places where I think we could really improve efficiency in our government. | ||
| But again, we've got to study that before we just go cut people who are doing that important work now. | ||
| Let's talk to Anthony, an independent in South River, New Jersey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Thank you guys for coming in. | ||
| Thank you, Dr. Schreier. | ||
| I'm actually calling on the medical professional line. | ||
| I am a retired medical laboratory technologist with a background in blood banking and apheresis. | ||
| And my question is about the plasma apheresis therapy that was available for the COVID pandemic, where they would, you know, just for the audience, | ||
| they would take plasma from patients who had COVID and have recovered sufficiently, but they had the antibodies, and then they would give those to newly infected patients so the antibodies from that plasma could treat the newly infected patients. | ||
| And I was wondering why the government, because the pharmaceutical companies, I believe, would not push that therapy because they couldn't make a lot of money on it, but why the government didn't really push for that, you know, especially with Dr. Marks and everything to make that more of a reality. | ||
| And I was just wondering what the doctor's thoughts on that were. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Anthony, thank you for that question. | ||
| Just to maybe explain that for people listening who don't know about apheresis, the idea was before we had treatments that could be sort of disease altering and life-saving for people with COVID. | ||
| And before we had vaccination, one of the ways that we could deal with this was taking the serum and antibodies from people who had already gotten over COVID, purify them, and then inject them into people with COVID who are in dire straits and at very high risk of dying and help them. | ||
| Now there are other treatments that are available and are, I believe, cheaper to produce at mass quantities. | ||
| I didn't make those decisions and I'm not familiar with the intricacies of why those decisions happen, but I'll tell you that that's why we have those scientists at the FDA and at the NIH figuring out what the best path forward is. | ||
| All right, Representative Kim Schreier, Democrat of Washington, member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and co-chair of the Congressional Doctors Caucus. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us today. | ||
| Thank you, Mimi. | ||
| Coming up next, Bipartisan Policy Center Vice President William Hoagland discusses Republican efforts to pass a budget blueprint to advance the White House's legislative agenda. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Democracy. | |
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process, a process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| This Saturday, watch the final segment in our 10-part American History TV series, First 100 Days. | ||
| We've been exploring the early months of presidential administrations with historians and authors and through the C-SPAN archives. | ||
| And we've learned about accomplishments and setbacks and how events impacted presidential terms and the nation up to present day. | ||
| This Saturday, the first 100 days of Donald Trump's first term. | ||
| As a businessman, he won elective office for the first time in 2016 by defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton. | ||
| President Trump pushed for construction of a wall at the southern border, a travel ban against people from certain countries, repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and a tax cut plan. | ||
| He also nominated Neil Gorsuch for Supreme Court, the first of three justices confirmed to the High Court during his presidency. | ||
| Watch the final program in our American History TV series, First 100 Days, Saturday at 7 p.m. Eastern on American History TV on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Washington Journal continues. | |
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're joined now by William Hoagland. | ||
| He's Senior Vice President of the Bipartisan Policy Center. | ||
| We'll be talking about the GOP budget plans and reconciliation. | ||
| Bill, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much for having me. | |
| So, Speaker Johnson wants the House to finalize a vote on the budget resolution this week. | ||
| Broadly, give us an idea of what's included in that budget framework and how critical you think that would be to President Trump's agenda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's important for the President's agenda because the procedures that we have to go through to adopt a budget resolution sets up a process that allows for the consideration of legislation that would not be subject to a filibuster in the United States Senate. | |
| So this is critical that the House adopt what the Senate adopted last week that sets up the process for doing reconciliation. | ||
| The Senate budget resolution that passed last week is before the House and what the Speaker is asking is a vote on what the Senate adopted last week. | ||
| And what the Senate adopted last week was a framework. | ||
| I like to call it monopoly money at this point. | ||
| It's not real money yet. | ||
| It's monopoly money. | ||
| But it set a framework for how much to spend, how much to raise in the way of revenues, how much or to cut in the way of revenues, how much to cut in spending. | ||
| And the only difference here, I've been with the Budget Committee for a long time on Capitol Hill. | ||
| There's a slight difference in the way this budget resolution is put together from past. | ||
| It leaves flexibility to the committees in the Senate and in the House to how much to do in the way of cuts and spending. | ||
| But if you were to look at it, overall, the two budget resolutions, House and the Senate and the Senate resolution specifically, will set up a process that would allow for the consideration of a tax cut in the neighborhood of $4.5 to $5 trillion over the next year. | ||
| These are the Trump tax cuts. | ||
| That would be made permanent. | ||
| That would be good. | ||
| Not new tax cuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not new taxes. | |
| It would make them permanent. | ||
| And in that score, as I say, the budget adopting this resolution is critical so that the resolution that sets up the tax cut later on would not be subject to a 60-vote filibuster in the Senate. | ||
| So this is really important to the President's agenda, particularly on the tax cut side. | ||
| Now, there are some GOP critics in the House saying it's just not doing enough to address the debt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| The Senate resolution does not specify the level of cuts that the House would like to see. | ||
| The House has cuts of reductions in spending over the next 10 years of nearly $2 trillion, while as the Senate, at least what they had said was a minimal amount, was in the neighborhood of $4 to $5 billion. | ||
| And so it's setting up the process to allow for negotiations between that $2 trillion figure that the House wants versus the smaller figure that the Senate wants. | ||
| But at this particular point, I think the House members are upset that it's not the higher number. | ||
| If you'd like to join our conversation with Bill Hoagland, you can call us. | ||
| We're talking about the budget. | ||
| We're talking about spending, revenue, cuts. | ||
| Any question or comment regarding those topics, you can give us a call. | ||
| The lines are bipartisan. | ||
| So Republicans are on 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats are on 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, you can call us on 202-748-8002. | ||
| What is the Bipartisan Policy Center's view on this budget plan? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Bipartisan Policy Center, what do we do? | |
| Or what, I mean, do you have a view on the budget itself? | ||
| Do you think it's a good one? | ||
| Do you think it needs to be changed? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have to be careful. | |
| It's bipartisan. | ||
| We want bipartisanship, of course. | ||
| I spent a long time working on the budget. | ||
| As I said, I worked on the Senate Budget Committee for nearly 25 years up here on the Hill. | ||
| This is, let me just put it this way. | ||
| These resolutions do not do the job that I think is necessary to reduce the deficit over the next 10 years. | ||
| We hope that this could be done in a bipartisan way. | ||
| Budget resolutions, reconciliation bills have become more partisan over the years. | ||
| I recall 1997 when we had a balanced budget agreement, which was worked out between Republicans and Democrats and President Clinton. | ||
| So I think we're sad that this is not being done more in a bipartisan way. | ||
| I will simply say that this budget resolution, if adopted, probably doesn't do the job to reduce the debt deficits that we are all concerned about at the Bipartisan Policy Center. | ||
| So if this does not pass the House, we're expecting votes soon, maybe even today. | ||
| What happens? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, quite frankly, what I'm reading and what I'm picking up here is if it does not, if they do not have the votes to pass this budget resolution to set up a streamlined, fast way of consideration of the President's tax cuts and other spending cuts, that the House may proceed on their own simply to put together bills that would reflect what they would like to see in the way of tax cuts and spending and basically pass individual bills. | |
| And they could do that outside of this budget resolution. | ||
| And they could, if they had the votes to pass those kinds of bills, then essentially they would go to, it would just be a bill, a bill that the Senate would consider. | ||
| It would not be what we call in the Senate privileged, which means it would not be protected from the filibuster or amendments. | ||
| But they could clearly say we're just simply going to pass the bills as we think are necessary to reduce spending or cut taxes the way we see it. | ||
| And we'll just take our chances and pass those bills. | ||
| And on the Senate side, the Republicans have said, look, this is the best that we can do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Remember that we go back to the beginning here when Mr. At the beginning of this Congress, Mr. Thuen wanted to do what he called a smaller bill, which was basically to make some cuts in spending, but also to provide additional spending for defense and the border. | ||
| And that would have been what we called a smaller bill. | ||
| Now we're looking at, and if quite frankly, I think that could have passed and that could have gotten moved us down the road and then we could move on to, I know this is getting complicated, but we also have to deal with fiscal year 26, which is coming up. | ||
| We are dealing right now with fiscal year 25. | ||
| We haven't even got to the fact that we're going to have to go through this process again for fiscal year 26. | ||
| And fiscal 25 started last October. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Last October. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I want to play a portion of Speaker Mike Johnson talking about the reconciliation process at his news conference yesterday, and then I'll get your reaction. | ||
| We've been working on this for over a year. | ||
| We started this process well before most of the people in this room agreed with us that we would have this moment of unified government where we would have Republican majorities in the House and Senate and of course the White House as well. | ||
| And so we started that process. | ||
| I want to make four important points about the Senate's amendment to our House resolution. | ||
| Number one, the budget resolution is not the law. | ||
| All this does is it allows us to continue the process, begin drafting the actual legislation that really counts, and that's the one big, beautiful bill. | ||
| Number two, the Senate amendment makes no changes to the reconciliation instructions that we put into the budget resolution. | ||
| So our objectives remain intact. | ||
| Number three, any final reconciliation bill has to include historic spending reductions that we included in our resolution while also safeguarding essential programs. | ||
| And you've heard a commitment from us over and over that that will happen, and the President has said it himself over and over as well. | ||
| The fourth point is that reconciliation will be a collaborative process between the House and Senate. | ||
| You're going to see the Republican Party and both chambers working together as one team. | ||
| I know that's a rare occasion and people don't really know what that looks like, but we're actually going to do it this time. | ||
| The House is not going to participate in an us versus them charade. | ||
| We won't do it. | ||
| Your comments on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Number one, first of all, I think he's absolutely correct. | |
| This is, as I said at the outset, this is monopoly money we're dealing with right now. | ||
| It's not real money. | ||
| The real money comes when we actually put the bills together. | ||
| Number two, yes, he is correct that the budget resolution that the Senate passed has two reconciliation instructions, one for the Senate, one for the House. | ||
| It's absolutely correct. | ||
| It still has the same numbers that was in the House. | ||
| Senate's smaller. | ||
| That's what I think they're concerned about, is if they have to negotiate, they'll end up at a number that's smaller than the House because the Senate numbers are smaller. | ||
| Protection of Medicare, Medicaid, it's going to be tough at $880 billion. | ||
| You had your Congresswoman here before. | ||
| It's going to be tough, but there may be ways in which you can reach those numbers without major reductions in Medicare benefits out there, Medicaid benefits, I'm sorry. | ||
| And yes, if we can get this passed, we're going to have to have cooperation between the House and the Senate in terms of working out the differences between their two reconciled instructions. | ||
| He also said that the final reconciliation bill will include, quote, historic spending reductions. | ||
| Is historic defined? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, do we know? | |
| I think it varies on your perspective as to $2 trillion over 10 years is rather a large number. | ||
| And I would say that is pretty historic. | ||
| That is a large, very large. | ||
| But I want to point out at the same time, These reconciliation bills, both Senate and the House, are extending tax cuts. | ||
| And so that on net, while there were spending reductions, there's more tax reductions than there are spending reductions. | ||
| And so overall, it's still an increase in the deficit over the next 10 years. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's talk to callers, and we'll start with Nancy in North Carolina, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Nancy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Thank you, Mr. Hoagland, for being on today. | ||
| I appreciate your expertise. | ||
| And what I want to ask is, going back to the first Trump administration when all these tax cuts were put in, now it's always been controversy about whether it was just something for the really rich people to give them a break or it was supposed to help the middle class. | ||
| And I have never really determined if they were helpful to the middle class or if, in fact, they were more for the billionaires and everything. | ||
| Can you help straighten me out on this? | ||
| I will try, Nancy. | ||
| The answer is, first of all, that those tax cuts in 2017 did reduce the marginal tax rates for the middle income, but it's also reduced the marginal tax rates at the higher income. | ||
| So overall, it has a major, should have had a major reduction in the taxes that had to be paid in the middle income, but it also did reduce taxes. | ||
| It also did a number of things as it relates to the business tax capital gains and also business taxes, corporate taxes. | ||
| One could argue whether or not that benefits only billionaires or millionaires, whatever. | ||
| But the long story short here is, Nancy, that it was a tax bill that was designed in large part to benefit not just the very wealthy, but also the middle class by making those reductions and changing in deductions and credits for the middle income population out there. | ||
| You wrote an opinion piece for The Hill about being a bit critical about the type of accounting that the Senate would be using to extend tax cuts. | ||
| Can you explain that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| This is in the weeds. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| This is in the weeds. | ||
| Normally what we talk about when we are doing scoring, I began my career at the Congressional Budget Office. | ||
| We say that, and historically, we score these changes, taxes or spending, to what we call current law. | ||
| Current law. | ||
| Current law says that these tax cuts will expire at the end of this year. | ||
| What the Senate has done is say, no, we're going to use something called current policy, which means that these tax cuts would continue on. | ||
| And so that if we make changes, we aren't adding to the deficit or debt because there's zero cost to extending what is current law in current policy. | ||
| It is something that hasn't been done before, and that's why I was critical of it in my comments. | ||
| Here's an independent in Mechanicsville, Maryland. | ||
| Stephen, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My question is to do with the threat of the unitary executive FISC. | ||
| All this, what appears to be incidental juridical blood clotting, the lawsuits, court challenges, and so forth. | ||
| Well, those seem to provide a coincident narrative. | ||
| The admin can challenge judicial overreach. | ||
| All the while you have consolidation and contraction of the BFS, Bureau of Fiscal Services, and the Fed and OMB. | ||
| What have previously been understood as reciprocally presupposing powers of congressional and executive budgetary discretion? | ||
| They're now being consumed by Donald Trump and Elon Musk. | ||
| Rohan Gray, he's a law professor at William University and a research director at the Digital Fiat Currency Institute. | ||
| He has a paper on this called Digitizing the Fisk. | ||
| I'd recommend that reading. | ||
| Are Democrats or Republicans concerned about this possibility? | ||
| Is there any consideration for what Rohan Gray calls bottlenecks and a reconfiguration of a preventative measure? | ||
| That's my question. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, Stephen. | ||
| I would say, yes, there are concerns raised. | ||
| This Congressional Budget Impoundment Control Act that was created 50 years ago grew out of a crisis that we had at that particular time by President Nixon, who was impounding funnies that the President referred to as the Imperial Presidency. | ||
| And the whole act, the Congressional Budget Impoundment Control, was raison d'être for what President Nixon was doing. | ||
| It set up a procedure by which presidents, if you want to not spend money that has been authorized and appropriated by Congress, there is a procedure, Mr. President. | ||
| All you have to do is submit what we call a rescion of those spending items that you think are not necessary. | ||
| But Congress will act upon that. | ||
| What we see right now, and it's something I'm very concerned about, is that in this unitary-type approach that the President's taking, he is avoiding sending those rescission messages to the President, to the Congress to act upon. | ||
| And what's unusual to me is that in that Impoundment Control Act, if those rescission proposals were put before Congress, it is a simple majority, both House and Senate, and also fast-track, not subject to a filibuster. | ||
| So I do not quite understand if these cuts and reductions in spending that the President's talking about, Mr. Musk is talking about, simply go ahead and submit the rescissions. | ||
| And by the way, I've seen even the conservative Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has said, Mr. President, simply submit the rescuions, as has Senator Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Budget Committee. | ||
| So I am concerned that the President is not following the law, if you like. | ||
| And in fairness to the administration, they, I guess, believe that the law of the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional and would like to see this ruled in the courts. | ||
| Just go to Manchester, Connecticut, line for Democrats. | ||
| Is it Zhuon? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, the name is Zhuang. | |
| Juan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But that's okay. | |
| You can call me anything you want. | ||
| Juan. | ||
| Juan, Juan. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't have a question. | ||
| I'm out of questions. | ||
| I just have a comment. | ||
| What is going on in our House of Representatives and Senate? | ||
| It's a farce. | ||
| All they're talking about is working on the progress to set up, not a progress, a process, working on a process to set up a process which finally will come to a process, but where nothing is addressed. | ||
| I mean, this is something that can only be, I'm talking about the budget deficits, spending, consuming more than we produce. | ||
| This can only be solved with pain. | ||
| Something has to give. | ||
| Either Social Security is, the benefits are cut outright, which I don't even want to think of the consequences, but I really don't think of any other way of bringing things to sanity, or you restrict who can join, who is eligible for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. | ||
| But our representatives, and I blame them as much as us, the American people, we want all the pleasure without pain, and I'm sorry that can't happen. | ||
| And I wish that the Democrats and Republicans would finally act like grown-ups and tell the little kids, the American people, and tell us, look, you want this much in spending. | ||
| All right, John, we got it. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, listen, I agree with you. | |
| I agree with you completely. | ||
| I think that the American public asks for an awful lot from their government. | ||
| At the same time, they're not, and I don't like paying taxes any more than anybody else, I guess. | ||
| But the bottom line here is if we're going to demand these services, if we're going to demand these benefits that we have out there, we have to start paying for these benefits if we're not willing to reduce them and modify them. | ||
| There will be pain coming on, and the pain, unfortunately, will be for our children, our grandchildren, the people down the road here. | ||
| I always like to reference a former chairman of the House Budget Committee, a Democrat, Leon Panetta, later White House advisor, Defense Secretary, CIA, who always said in one of his last interviews, there's two ways you get things done in this town. | ||
| One is through crisis and one is through leadership. | ||
| Unfortunately, we're lacking leadership both in the well, we'll just stop there. | ||
| If we don't get the leadership on this, if we don't get the cooperation, both Republicans and Democrats in a bipartisan way, then I think we will face a crisis at some point. | ||
| And I'll just let our audience know that actually right now, as we speak, the House Rules Committee is meeting to set up floor debate on the GOP budget plan. | ||
| You can watch that live on our website right now. | ||
| It will also be there for you after the program in our archive so you can go back and watch that as well. | ||
| Here's Marcia, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Marcia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you today? | |
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I have a question. | |
| I mean, I keep hearing all this talk about we're going to, you know, cut the deficit, the budget, we're going to save all this money and bring it down and all this, but I'm just curious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't see the House doing anything to stop some of the nonsense on Trump, just like I'm hearing all of a sudden now that, I mean, I know during his first term, he was talking about a military parade, blah, blah, blah. | |
| Well, now I'm hearing it again. | ||
| $3 million he wants to spend on June 14th for a military parade. | ||
| And supposedly he's saying it's to celebrate the 230th or 50th anniversary for the United States Army. | ||
| Well, we know better. | ||
| He's an egomaniac. | ||
| And he bulldozes his way to get anything he wants. | ||
| The House, the Senate, they do nothing to stop this man. | ||
| So, Marcia, you're calling on the Republican line. | ||
| Did you support President Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I've never supported him. | |
| I am a Republican, but I am a Liz Cheney Republican. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Go ahead, Bill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Marcia, I think you've highlighted an important point. | |
| Spending doesn't seem to be the issue here when it comes to some of the priorities that the President has. | ||
| Spending reductions that the President would like to focus on are other people have difference of opinion. | ||
| But I will simply say, Marcia, that I probably have the same sentiments that you've expressed as it relates to a military parade, not something that we see here in the United States. | ||
| We see that in the Red Square or other places, but not in this, not in the United States. | ||
| Here's Catherine in Philadelphia, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just had a comment here. | ||
| When are the office, the inspector generals, is there any way that how are we going to actually know that there's no fraud, waste, and abuse without having office of inspector generals? | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| My second question, too, is that I think the Supreme Court, this immunity situation, needs to be revisited because no one should be immune from anything. | ||
| That's the thirdly. | ||
| And I just think it's ridiculous. | ||
| I just think that, and another thing, too, our taxpayer funds are going to billionaires to pay for their contracts. | ||
| So no one is actually taking a look at, you know, there's no oversight over or transparency as to how these tax funds, our taxpayer dollars are going towards paying billion-dollar contracts. | ||
| There's a lack of transparency all across the board. | ||
| And there's no one on earth that should be immune from anything. | ||
| Yep, we got that point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
First of all, in terms of the IGs, yes, we have acting IGs. | |
| The Inspector Generals are still charged with carrying out the reviews of programs for waste, fraud, and abuse, as you mentioned. | ||
| Number two, in terms of the Supreme Court, I'm not a lawyer. | ||
| I simply say that I hear your point there. | ||
| As it relates to the issue of overcharging or charging in contracts, I would simply point out, in fact, this morning we're seeing a really dangerous situation, I think, with the IRS, a number of the IRS leadership resigning. | ||
| And yet we do have coverage there where we're supposed to look at what we call the issues associated with what we call the tax gap, nearly $800, $600, $800 billion in taxes that are not being paid. | ||
| And we should be looking at that. | ||
| And that's a responsibility, I think, of this new administration. | ||
| We shouldn't be just looking at waste, fraud, and abuse, if you like, in the spending programs. | ||
| We should also be looking at the oversight of the IRS that's maybe subject to some real challenges this morning given the changes in leadership there. | ||
| Now, President Trump has said that tariffs will make up for lost tax revenues. | ||
| How likely is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think we've seen, quite frankly, in the last few days in terms of the market and others, that I think that we have uncertainty out there. | |
| I think to try to plan a budget on the basis of the revenues coming in from the tariffs is at this point it would not be prudent, let's say, to assume the $600 billion a year, which the administration is suggesting they're going to collect, given that he's also talking about negotiating. | ||
| So I don't think it's fair to build into a deficit reduction any of these tariff proposals that are out on the table right now. | ||
| Also, I would simply suggest, we've seen, of course, from the markets and from announcements from various leaders in the CEOs, that we may be facing a recession. | ||
| Quite frankly, if we have a recession, then we're going to talk about a major reduction in revenues, overall revenues coming in. | ||
| So this is a dangerous situation as it relates to basing your hope that you're going to collect a lot of revenues from these tariffs. | ||
| And this is what you were talking about, about the IRS head of IRS to resign in protest as agency Ink steel to share tax data on illegal immigrants with DHS. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's in the New York Post, if you would like to read it. | ||
| And here is Ted in Minneapolis Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Ted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd just like to bring up the fact that back in 2017, Trump allowed his corporate tax to drop immensely. | ||
| And the idea was, supposedly, that we're going to be putting this money back into our companies, back in the infrastructure of the companies, expanding our equipment, and being more innovative. | ||
| The bottom line is, we didn't do that. | ||
| What happened was that money that we gave them back in tax breaks actually went back in their pockets and in their shareholders. | ||
| And I think it's a great place of America. | ||
| Back in the 50s and in the 60s, the corporate tax was in the 30 percentile. | ||
| We are below 10 percent. | ||
| So there's becoming more and more millionaires and more and more billionaires off the taxpayers' back. | ||
| That's why this country is broke. | ||
| The corporations are not paying their fair share into this country. | ||
| And they're going to do the same identical thing. |